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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.