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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."
Is there any limit on how much you can optimize.. eventually, everything will be at equillibrium...
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)
Make the front page scroll to infinity- then no one can complain.
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.
This was tried during the dot com boom. It just dosen't work. Isn't this what Google was supposed to stop?
Just by using XHTML compliant code and writing in our blog my fiancee and I are the #1 result in Google, Yahoo, and the new MSN search for a wide variety of topics. This includes areas we only talk about in one post or something. Perhaps the $$ and time that people spend on search engine optimization sites/links/etc would be better spent writing proper XHTML?
Our site is http://www.caseyandanna.com [No link, please don't slashdot!]
A few of the common search terms that we see involve: Cinara Aphids, Shrek2 pictures/etc (my typo), Aramark norovirus
Anyway, that's our experience.
I run a music site (Yeah, i know, shameless link...) that is constantly being beaten out by 3 domains. I did a whois on the owners and they're all the same guy in india.
I heard that this is why Google signed up for domain selling. They're getting their hands on the whois information to cross reference.
That would get rid of a lot of falce pagerank building...
Wouldn't it be ironic for a Search Engine Optimization company to be on the 2nd, 3rd, or worse, even below, in Google's list? :-P
Am I the only one who considers SEO unethical, almost to the sense of Nvidia or ATI making drivers that would cheat on benchmark programs? If your page is what someone wants, good, if it isn't, you can pay Google and they'll advirtise it on the side of the page along with all the other junk.
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.
Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...how much does business increase or decrease when the moderators post an ad^H^Harticle on slashdot?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Results 1 - 10 of about 48,400 for european natural wigs. (0.30 seconds)
My friend was once marketed by a company who was trying to sell car security systems. What they wanted to sell him was a website where he could market these systems himself. They claimed that all he had to do was purchase a premade website, for $12,000. After selling 15 systems, it would pay for itself. If the website didn't pay for itself, he would get his money back.
Anyway, as soon as he purchased, he noticed that his page was showing up on page 50+ on google. So, he wanted to fix this. He payed big bucks to a Search Engine Optomization company. In return, within a few months the company had him moved up to the 2nd page.
Did it work, yes! Was it worth it, no. Everything they had him do, I suggested to him (I found lists of techniques online). By the way, he got his $12,000 back (sounded like a scam to me, but I guess not).
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'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.
There are some keywords you can tell Google to exclude if you don't want web stores. Try adding -price or -shipping or -checkout to your query.
A study conducted by a CEO of a SEO company shows that using a SEO company can create a thriving online business, and not using one can mean banckrupty.
In other news: Mafia concludes that not paying them protection money can be hazardous to your health ! Stay tuned for more headlines from the cutting edge of research !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Since the dawn of the web, workarounds and cheat have continually been found to "optimize" search results. The sad result of every web site's quest to appear at the top of search results is that it has prevented search engines from providing "objectively relavent" results.
While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page the way a human does and connect it with the requested search terms. Something similar to the Cyc project that Doug Lenat has been working on since the 80's (and its subsequent OpenCyc F/OSS derivative, only tied into search engines. And, no, I am not talking about Ask Jeeves or other silliness like that. ; )
Otherwise, "relevance" is just going to become a euphamism for "the people with the most money to 'optimize' their results"
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?
"The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."
Which is called the prisoner's dilemma. If no one uses these SEO's everyone is relatively happy, someone uses it to their benefit / detriment of others (as they go down the list). Everyone then starts wasting time / money using them and we are at a nasty outcome.
"Slashdot carries a story on First Posts posting. Among some bold claims: Moderation is up 1000000 times and karma plumets, once you hit the submit button. The catch: eventually everyone will try to do a FP, and there is only one first post."
My sig can beat up your sig
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.
The point of a search engine is not for the comopanies to be found to sell things to people... the point is for people to be able to find the information they are LOOKING for, thus the most visited, or however x search engine runs things. This DESTROYS that method, so whereas when you now look for "2005 Corvette" Chevy's website comes up, in a few months, it'll be Yo Mama humping a camel, because the pr0n site hosting that crap will be able to pay the most....
Christ I'm not crying cause my site won't be found, I'm complain cuz I won't be able to find the site I need.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
In most trades, when someone comments on SEO, it's almost always a quote from one of the founders of SearchEngineWatch, a subscription only forum and web site focused on "Search Engine Marketing." Reasearching the site, it really is amazing how many people and companies are involved in "optimization." This field is getting huge, and as the article says, just about every major business is doing it. FYI, most of the strategies involved aren't fraud (like farm linking) but rather how certain keywords and meta tags result in different search engine rankings.
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
You are right that mass market products will reach equilibrium. So, everyone is hoping for some little clever trick that will make them something special. Sadly, whenever you have a market condition where people feel they need to pull tricks for survival, you will create a market rife with scams.
Anyone with a defineable, replicable trick will probably end up selling out to the mass market fearing that their competition will sell out first.
Personally, I think the best hope against SEO tricks is for the market to have more independent directories and search engines with radically different algorithms and results. This world where your web site thrives or dwindles on the caprice of a single engine (google) or single directory (DMOZ) is far from ideal.
Self promoting sig: yes, I waste time making things like this page of Salt Lake Bands. I think others should waste time pounding out blogs and sites with things they think worthwhile.
This is a great idea. Actually, companies like Google and MS and Yahoo could hire the legions of unemployed dot-commers who keep refusing to get a new job/career and let them do it. Sure, every search would take a minute or so, but the results would be great, and all of the dot-commers could go back to the cube life they so enjoyed.
I don't respond to AC's.
The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page.
Obviously, what we need are bigger first pages.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
More to the point, we'll soon reach a need for disparate search engines: one that caters to commercial needs and one that caters to "information only."
Perhaps this also will never happen, much as the ".com" intended for "company" soon came to mean "anyone with a website."
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Google's official statement on search engine optimization gives a number of reasons to be wary of search engine optimizers. While not condemning them outright, they have almost nothing positive to say.
I would think anyone paying money to "guarantee a higher rank on Google" would want to first see what Google itself says about the subject.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
How about people stop making sites that are so similar to existing sites that they are unnecessary? Before you launch your internet business, maybe you should try this.
1.) Go to Google and type in the search terms you would use to find a site like the one you're proposing.
2.) If you get more than a page of sites offering the exact same thing, find another idea because you're fighting an uphill battle.
I understand that there are some fields where there will be similarity. Geico, Progressive, and State Farm would all like to be at the top of the "auto insurance" search. But if you want to open an online bookstore, you'd darn well better have something to set you apart from the million other online booksellers (especially Amazon) or you're dead meat no matter what your Google ranking is. Find out what that one thing is, and specialize in it. Be the best online seller of 18th century railroad books or two-headed troll dolls. If you can't rise to the top in a highly specialized area, you deserve your obscurity.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
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
Maybe they need personalized search filters and a "never show me results from here" button.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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.
I actually write SEO content -- but in a specialized manner. All of my content has to be keyword specific -AND- useful. Its the only way to get onto the search engines, and realistically stay there.
My works never involved link farming, or similar sort, and in the end results in better company pages (and ranks).
However, my competition doesn't see things in that way: They put bullcrap up for the search engines, which results in more bullcrap jobs for SEO.
(And by SEO, I mean standard content for websites. SEO is becoming the requirement for all pages to get into google at all... not just spider food (Bad SEO))
I can't say I don't like SEO: Its my job. However, if Spider food is banned or removed and replaced with half-decent content that actually means something, the internet would be better off.
Unfortunately, companies want to pay 1 or 2 dollars per 500+ word article for spider food, and expect their rankings to sky rocket. (I only write for higher paying markets. If the company is serious about good content, they should pay for it.)
Content writing has been outsourced just as much as tech jobs, straight to India. So you pay for crap, and get crap.
With so much crap out there, one good content writer CAN drastically improve a company. Now, this won't have such drastic change in the future, but right now its making a real difference.
It'd be nice if people were more concerned about having GOOD sites, rather than spamming search engines. While it costs more to get into it, the results will be better for everyone.
But, until some companies get over actually having to pay consultants and writers, I think it will be more junk in, more junk out. This is a prime example of how outsourcing is doing a lot more damage than good. (even the SEO companies are starting to outsource instead of using inhouse writers -- which means non-native, half of the time non-fluent English writers.)
It is quite frustrating, really.
Companies like the one in the article, while expensive, do tend to be more effective than the 1 or 2 dollar jobs -- in the long run. I just wish the companies would see it that way as well.
-- RJ
All good websites need to use proper search engine optimization to let search engines and users find them. There are two types of SEO: those which are valid and important parts of site design and those which are tactics designed to trick search engines. I always help my clients with the first while reminding them that trying to trick the search engines is a good way to get themselves blacklisted.
A lot of websites don't even say what they do. How is a user expected to find your website if it doesn't say what it does? Clearly state the purpose of your website and the purpose of every page so that users and search engines will know what to expect. How many websites don't even have titles or have poor titles on most of the pages? A lot.
Websites tend to use images or Flash where text would serve them better. Stating what you do in an image or Flash does nothing to help search engines find you. Often these sites contain so many images and fancy animations that users have trouble navigating them. Websites should remember the golden rule of user-interface design: keep it simple stupid. Text should be text and not an image or Flash. If you must use an image or Flash then you should use the proper alt and title tags and you should repeat the same text as text in your page.
Many websites don't tell anybody they exist. They post something great but nobody ever finds it because they don't create incoming links for themselves. When you make a website, or a major new page to your website, then tell people about it. Tell people on archived mailing lists you use, list it with directories such as dmoz, etc. I personally encourage my clients to create community sites around their product and to sponsor paid-links (not ad banners) on informational websites related to their product.
Most of the steps involved are completely legitimate things you should be doing for your website anyway. The best way to rise to the top is to provide good content and to act like a website is expected to act.
A lot of howto websites have problems in SEO. They post useful information telling us how to do useful things but because they haven't considered their users actually finding their site they tend to be hard to find. That's why when you search for something you tend to find the first couple pages filled with unrelated spam and links to forums and mailing list articles. I had this problem myself for a long time. It's only been in the past year that I've began making an effort to get my howto's to rank well when people search for information on those topics.
Tricking search engines is negative SEO. It may work for a while but when the search engines catch on it can seriously hurt your placement. You shouldn't need to do these things either. Some things such as creating links to and from your website are perfectly valid but are often abused by people who have the misimpression that spamming out thousands of links is going to help them. For a while it might but usually not for very long.
Strategic partnerships with appropiate cross-linking is the way to go. Think of the way Slashdot links to Newsforge, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc and they link back. THAT is the right way to do it. It's also not a bad idea to create rss feeds of your website that others can include into their own websites. THAT's a good way to get a lot of links back to your site.
Hopefully as awareness grows more websites will be properly optimized. Doing so will certainly make life easier for users Googling for what they want to know.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Alright man, I don't want to be mean, but I got greater undestanding of your post from the replies than from the post itself. This leads to two suggestions:
Best of luck, but you've done nothing to convince me Google isn't an awesome search engine with impeccable policies.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara