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Climbing up the Search Ladder
j_heisenberg writes "Wired carries a story on SEOs or search engine optimizers. Among some bold claims: traffic is up 6 times and sales double, once you hit the first page of results on major engines. The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."
The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page
You mean like the Pyramid Scheme?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Why should I truest oneupweb when they don't have the #1 position for the keywords 'search engine optimization'? :-)
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
The problem now is that the internet is looking more like a catalog. Sometimes I want to learn about something beyond what those selling things want to tell me. I'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.
Why is it stupid? Well lets look at it:
1. What keeps people on your site? Optimization? Or quality content? What got/keeps people at slashdot? Content or optimization?
2. Search engines catch on, and adjust so nobody super inflates.
3. It's not a business strategy! You ultimately need to have something more.
4. SPAM. How do you think search engine optimization promises super high rankings? They use their bots to spam blogs, forums, guest books, etc. To inflate google based on page rank. Effective? Yea, even with the new rel="nofollow", but it's not good. And could get you blackisted as a spammer as many domains are finding.
Search Engine Optmization just rings of illicit behaviour that is closely related to spamming. I'm aware there are "honest" individuals who insure that the page is well formed, uses proper heading/title tags, but what of those blackhat individuals who stop at nothing to boost pagerank and call themselves SEO's?
Take for instance Referral spamming of weblogs. Certain bloggers would publish their recent referrers lists and these spammers caught on and well, I now receive several hundred fake referrers from various v~1~a~g~r~a types, to seemingly legit websites. Of course, upon checking their website, you can see that there is no link directing visitors to my page.
Did the website owners use this tactic? I'm sure some have, but what about others who have turned to "SEO experts" who resort to these tactics?
I'm not even going to get into Comment spam. That's just a horrid thing that is on par with trapping email spam in terms of difficulty.
I though that Google's algoritms were designed to prevent this type of crap. I know Google isn't the only search engine, but I believe it is the most used (isn't it?). Thus, these SEOs ought to have limited effect of ranking, should they not.
That part of the TFA about Eastwood seems a little weak to me. They said they refurbished their website and then began to get more sales. They attribute tht to search engines. Could it not also be because the new design was more conducive to customers needs and thereby increasing sales?
no. because the system that you are optimizing for will continue to change as the optimizers continue to sabotage the quality of the ranking algorithms.
let's face it: people use google because the front page is full of links they find useful and relevant. as optimization services get better, and more and more companies looking to hock their wares pay to get on the front page, google will lose it's edge. the result will be an improved or different ranking algorithm and... the optimization cycle begins again.
hell, it's happening right now. google has announced that they will no longer be counting links with rel=nofollow in anchor tags when calculating pange rankings.
2 1337 4 u!
Yes, it is, but to just think if google was doing several million lookups a day off YOUR server.
You have to get licensed for that type of info.
Maybe Google could reduce the page rankings of pages with bad/incorrect/non-standard HTML?
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Specifically, you need people to have heard of you. Remember that many of the companies who employ these SEOs are selling products which would normally be sold through spam emails. They're not depending on some intelligent person to buy their products. They want the 8-year-old grandmother who every year pays those nice boys to apply sealant to her roof and always gets the special anti-rust coating for her car. They want the kind of guy who would actually click on a penile enlargement ad. They can afford to have a thousand surfers breeze right past their page for every person who buys something because, well, on the front page, you're being seen by millions of people each day. (Figures pulled out of my ass. Not sure what the actual amount of viewers of a particular search page would be, but I figure it's high) And even if you don't sell a product, you've left an impression on the person's mind. Unconsciously, they see "PHARMAKEIOS" and it's associated with their search for sleeping pills. Days later, someone will ask them about who offers sleeping pills, and the name will pop into their head.
That math is pretty simple. 0% of anything is nothing, but .1% of a huge number is still a fairly large number.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Where I work right now, they spend about $120,000 a week on advertising on google, yahoo, cnet, basically all the big search engines. Bring in about $500,000 in internet sales. Service is not that great, deals are the same you get anywhere else, but because we're at the top on search engines, we make money. Advertising is funny. Just like my post.
It makes you good at getting a higher score on the SATs, not actually improving your abilities.
Similarly, if your web site is aimed at getting a better page ranking, you'll get more attention even though you're not actually better.
It's a way to defeat - or at least get a leg up in the system. Unfortunately it means that everyone will have to do it in order to keep up, and eventually search engines will yeild the results of a popularity contest, not which web pages are most relevant. Especially when they're trying to sell something.
Come to think of it, this sounds just like politics as well...
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
The company I work for did the SEO thing. The SEO vendor provided us with a few dozen static HTML files that we were to drop into our web server's document root alongside our normal content. Obscure links to these "optimized" pages would seed the search engines.
When I went through the static HTML documents they produced, it occurred to me that they looked an awful lot like a real web site with actual content. Our web site is one of those brochure type sites: lots of expensive graphic design and layout, little actual marked up content.
The lesson: Build a real web site following good information design principles, make it readable to search engines, and then style it to make it look like the glossy brochure you seem to want instead. Use a healthy dose of hyperlinks to product descriptions as needed to ensure the right pages get the right focus, and you're set.
SEO appears to some executives as some magic computer voodoo designed to trick search engines into going for your content first. While that's partially accurate, the biggest impact on search engine listings is actually having useful content. Enough with the flashy text-in-graphics web sites and start writing pages with text-in-markup, and the search engines will notice.
The basic problem is the classic "Human-Machine Interface". Machines can't tell the difference from a page exploiting the scoring rules from one that is an honest web page playing by normal rules.
Google does honestly try to avoid this crap. The problem is in the end even with the cleverest scoring algorithm is still an algorithm. Knowing what Google programatically emphizes shows how to build web pages to take advantage of their rating which isn't necessarily a good web page or any more meaningful than anothers web page that doesn't take advantage of the information.
It is a constant tug of war between these guys and Google. Google is constantly trying to invent the best pattern matching to promote real information in web pages and not this fake stuff. These SEOs are constantly trying to find weak points in the rules that they can capitalize on.
ps. If MSN Search targets "trying to beat Google" instead trying to beat web pages and SEOs then they have already lost...
I'm considering Google as a broken search engine.
SandBox, overating links - link farm impact, hilltop oligarchy, big sites oligarchy, 2x32 double index as not able to go on 64Bit therefore sites dumped in secondary index, 301 redirects not working, 302 page hijacking...
There are a lot of faults they have to be blamed for doing nothing to solve it out.
But the sandbox massacre is a real crime they are responsible for to the Web community:
They dump about a year now 90 % of the new opened domains into a secondary index (mainly its assumed tha G$$gle is be not able to go over the 32 Bit barrier for siteids as all money is pumped in opening new shops and not in the core bussines SE) and thus never pop up in top SERPs. But as well a lot of this sites would in Googles normal algo if not Google would filter them out.
They block 1 year of 10 Internet year - what a crime!
Try this to see unfiltered results:
keyword keyword -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf
Or see all the great new domains filtered out for your keywords here.
Since that is what Google et are focussing on, or trying to. Don't go for the SEO trick of the day, since it will mean your site will drop when something changes. My experience is: write content. Watching the SERPs, tweaking your pages constantly, and checking your PR is a waste of time if you do it all the time. Add pages, and focus on the content. If your visitors like your pages, you get more links, and in the end that works better than the hack of the week. I am able to get 300+ visitors/day every month by just writing content. Other sites, blogs etc. link, my PageRank increases (currently 7). It goes more slow, but I am sure when Google tweaks its algorithm, I will keep my good position, or even go up a bit.
Perl Programmer for hire
I don't think search engine optimization is any different from any other kinds of marketing. You have anything from honest marketing, to really sleezy marketing techniques. Some ads leads to products that lives up to the promise, most ads leads to products that are totally bogus.
The issue today is that you can have a great site that no one will notice unless you at least make some rudimentary attempts to market it i.e. make it known to other people.
My own pet peeve is that I'm tired of searching for information on the web, just to get page after page of information telling me where I can buy a book about it.
His whole premise is anecdotally wrong based on the fact that paid placement exists. Businesses do not spend money on advertising which does not work. People find places to buy via search engines, and paid placement gets you there. Therefore, placement in search engines does work. Therefore, if you can get more hits via spending on SEO than you can via paid placement, you will spend it.
You don't "need more". If someone searches for "widget" to buy it, and you're #1, they'll click you and quite possibly buy from you; at most, they're likely to compare a couple sites to determine best price, get a feel for reputability (ie, your site "looks" legitimate), and other factors (testimonials? Ease of use? payment methods accepted?). But ultimately, if someone goes to a search engine to find a place to buy something, the paid results and the top few results are where they will buy.
What I want to know is, why does google not have an uber-customizeable "user profile" page where you can specify custom search modifiers via a pull-down menu, label them what you want, and then apply them to your searches as you go?
THeir "advanced search" does not include anywhere near all of the actual features which google supports, and its a shame as its sometimes difficult to figure out how to do some of the stuff.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Handing stupid money to a spammer^W Search Engine Optimizer is much easier.
Granted, given two companies, one who is doing all of the hard work, and one that is doing the stupid stuff, I know where my money will go.
www.eFax.com are spammers