Slashdot Mirror
NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that Newsweeks is taking a quick look at search engine optimization. From the article: "If search-engine rankings are supposed to represent a kind of democracy--a reflection of what Internet users collectively think is most useful--then search-engine optimizers like Fishkin are the Web's lobbyists. High-priced and in some cases slyly unethical, SEOs try to manipulate the unpaid search results that help users navigate the Internet. Their goal is to boost their clients' (and in some cases their own) sites to the top of unpaid search-engine rankings--even if their true popularity doesn't warrant that elevated status."
At least he's posting about something with which he has experience.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
The problem with search engines is that sometimes when you are looking for something specific, you end up using the wrong terms and get results that are not what you are looking for. Take this article, for example. As a technically-inclined website, you'd expect that "Search Engine Optimization" would refer to techniques and algorithms used by search engines to index pages faster and search through the indices faster.
Instead, it's about some company using link farms to boost website rankings. While this might be interesting to someone who was actually affected by page rankings, I doubt that anyone really cares about their page rank for anything other than vanity. In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results, so despite the efforts of companies such as this, their efforts simply can't overcome the value provided by serving real content.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
It's nice to see I'm not the only one who got a good laugh out of seeing * * Beatles-Beatles post a story about search engine optimization.
1. Add your domain name to your profile on slashdot
2. Post useless crap to slashdot
3. Enjoy increased traffic and pagerank
4. Profit!
No need for ???? here. The domain that beatles-beatles has on his profile has a pagerank of 5. I imagine a fair amount of that is from his slashdot posts.
If you don't have the google toolbar, you can check a pages pagerank here: http://www.only999.com/google_page_rank.php
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
The significance here is that Newsweek is running this story, which means that intelligent people without heavy business/technology backgrounds are learning about this. It shouldn't be something we don't already know a decent bit about, but now millions of Americans know about it.
Jacking up your ratings by any other means may work in the short-term, but let's face it, if you come up first on a search engine and your site is not relevant, what good does it do you (except of course in the case of porn and warez)?
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Point 1. If the search engines want to retain their value in returning valuable information, then they need to detect rank-promotion techniques and appropriately downrank them. Unfortunately, that will be an unending war.
Point 2. The reason these marketing "people" keep at it is because the fundamental economic system has become broken. It used to be true that 'you got what you pay for', at least roughly. In particular, if you got much less than you paid for, it was pretty easy to determine that the reason was some sort of fraud. Nowadays, it has become very difficult to tell the difference between 'good' stuff that's worth more money and cheap [often Chinese] imitations of the most popular models. At the same time, a nice brand name will allow selling roughly equivalent goods for several times the price. All broken.
The result? All values are becoming totally distorted, and they market presidential candidates and even wars in just the same reality-detached ways. Is the joke on the Chinese for continuing to accept the IOUs?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Having worked both in the tech press and the SEO-needy internet world, I can say that the article is interesting, but based on a fundamentally flawed premise.
Search engine rankings are not, and should not be, based on popularity. When you type "britney spears naked" into a search engine, you don't care about how many people have clicked on the resulting links. You're looking for *relevance*, which is entirely separate from popularity.
TFA is interesting, but that flawed presence really hurts it. SEO's don't try to convince SE's that a site is more popular (well, there's backlinks, but that's a whole different story). Instead, they try to convince SE's that a site is more relevant. The use of backlinks, etc, is entirely secondary to that purpose.
Me, I'm all for Google and other SE's efforts to negate the effects of SEO by detecting and penalizing SEO behavior (gateway pages, bogus backlinks, etc). SE's may be wrong about what a surfer wants, but intentionally trying to *make* them wrong us abusive to surfers and ultimately makes SE's less useful.
After all, if I have the biggest and best widgets site and try to trick SE's to linking to me for searches on "wodgets," it's only reasonable to expect that people who make "wodgets" will try to SEO "widgets". Customers end up not being able to find what they want, and SE traffic is devalued for everyone.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
Before everyone jumps directly to the conclusion that SEOs are evil, let me tell you this. As the article states, there are 2 kinds of SEOs:
Only the second kind is evil. Other SEOs out there actually do good things and truly make the Web a better place.
It's "Newsweek", not "NewsWeek" or "Newsweeks".
...that know how to flaunt the rules
Please flout rules. Do not flaunt them.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Newsweeks? I thought the name was trademarked and only one company could have it... Aren't you guys editors?
"Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." -Thomas Jefferson
I've found that to accurately measure the efficiency, bias, and efficacy of a search engine that it is best to rate them via the RTPI (Results to Pr0n Index) which is the number of results given before one of the links is a legitimate or stealth link to pr0n. Er... maybe I'm the only one who uses this.
The only way to counter this effect is to have a larger base (i.e. at least more the 50%) of educated and critical thinking people in a society. And maybe for the first time in history we might have the chance to get closer to this goal.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Alexa's ranking is less relevant these days, but still informative.
? range=1m&size=large&url=http://george-harrison.inf o
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details
If you click the link you'll get to see a graph of his "reach"
(% of internet users)
For those too lazy to click the damn link:
Traffic Rank for george-harrison.info
Today: 297,221
1 wk. Avg: 383,824
3 mos. Avg: 1,133,067
3 mos. Change: [UP] 502,098
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Quote: "even if their true popularity doesn't warrant that elevated status". What about the true popularity of politicians? Wouldn't it be better to compare search engine optimizers with the spin doctors in politics instead of the lobbyists?
I suppose repeating the same tactic in a second post would move me into the unethical category?
Matt Cutts offered his take on this article here where he talks about how Google can diagnose a lot of these black hat activities automtaically without any human intervention.
Personally, the "better mouse trap" addage definitely fits here. Black hat SEOs won't ever be stopped because of the way the web works currently. What I am wondering is when will domains that have a really early create date but are inactive are going to be realized for their SEO potential down the road. Older domains are definitely moving to the top of the list since the last Google update.
Hagrin.com
This is the same company that was recently covered on slashdot with their beginner's guide to SEO.
They also have a great search engine ranking factors list that contains a large list of the factors that influence rankings in the major SEs.
Sounds like Newsweek is actually on top of things for once (oh, and only a year-or-so late). Of course being a /.er, I didn't RTFA.
(and I'm staying out of the Beatles Beatles war!)
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
Hey! Submit an article like everyone else. n00b.
Ironically, the the site which hosts this article rel="nofollow"s all the links at the top. What would they do that for if not for SEO purposes?
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Please flout rules. Do not flaunt them.
What's wrong with displaying rules ostentatiously?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
You're chasing a ghost. It's not possible by definition. For instance, you can say on TV "We have a crisis in this country. Almost half - half, I say - of the population has less than average intelligence. We need to fix it. Now!"No matter what is done, this cannot be changed. The sad thing is, I would bet you could actually attract funding to fix this so-called problem.
No matter what you do, by definition half of the population is going to be subpar in anything you can name. The only hope is to put in charge a subset of the population which is smarter than average. As an example, I expect the readership of Slashdot to be such a population...
What I would think is "The only way to counter this effect is to have
Has anyone else noticed that Newsweek breaks your Back button? If you click your Back button immediately upon entering the site you can get back to your previous site. Otherwise four(!) pages show up in your Back button's history. WTF? Do they do this to try to keep you nailed to their site or is it some kind of Ajax (or whatever) side-effect? Either way it's annoying.
On a related point, isn't it time browsers were fixed so that when clicking the Back button would bring you to a page that redirected you to the current page, the browser has enough sense to bypass the redirecting page?
Insert witty sig here.
Wow... Two mentions in a single week on the site. I feel humbled - thanks /.
When Brad (Stone) originally wrote the piece, it was to be featured in Wired magazine. However, Chris Anderson, the magazine's editor, didn't like the piece in its final form, so Brad sold it to Newsweek. Brad and I spent about 4 hours together here in Seattle for the initial interview and another 5-10 in emails and phone calls.
I think he's done a good job of trying to encapsulate the industry from an outside perspective, but there's certainly more to be said and several inaccuracies (I pointed out several here).
SEO is more and more about influencing relevance via popularity - building links and building content that will generate links and recognition. I'm sure no one konws this better than Slashdotters. The industry has a long way to go to build public trust, but it's definitely a goal of mine and I believe the article should help.
Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz.org
The problem with SEO nowdays is that is has become an all out war for rankings, in which some people have no ethics. I have recently seen people registering the .net, .biz, .us, .co.uk, .info and .name all to put pages with no real content, just optimised for spiders to take the search traffic for a dot com. That shouldn't be how it is, google should put a lot more emphasis on the quality of the site and how good it's content is before relevant keywords as they are easily abused.
Business Voyeur
If you are in the market for SEO, the nice thing is, you shouldn't have to look to far on Google. If they can't get themselves to the top 5...
San Francisco Photographers
that you can manage to use a spell checker correctly on your web pages.
Ok, so it's probably not him, but I did get a rather nasty surprise when I clicked the submitter's name. Yes, it opened george-harrison.info, but almost immediately my browser was redirected to http://www.winfixer.com/pages/scanner/index.php?ai d=gb_ed2&lid=in&ex=1&p=&ax=1, which was most insistent that my PC had errors due to spyware and that I should download and install their product.
Good job I browse using Firefox...
Funny thing is, it's not doing it to me now (despite a Firefox restart, killing the site's cookie, etc) and I don't see anything in the page that could have caused it to happen (unless it's a random chance thing, or a once-a-day thing based on IP address, etc). Still, people using less secure browsers might want to be careful of clicking on the guy's username.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
that makes a great .signature LOL
fretful
I was hoping for a nice technical article for once, that would illustrate how to make your own search engine and how to make it fast on indexing and searching through millions of pages.
Of course, I was wrong.
Compare: More than 50% of the people have less than averege wealth (the superrich raise the average). This does not mean most of the population is poor.
I've been working with seo for a while. Not all seo companies give good reports on quality of their work. Therefore I've created an independent service which measures actual searchengine positions, and keeps track of it over time. Check it out if interested: http://www.seoreporter.com/ In general I would recommend non-biased search engine position reports if you consider buying seo services.
We have a number of websites, and a couple of "crown jewels" aka "profit centers." We were getting absolutely RAPED on adwords, but they were also driving ALL of the traffic that was actually BUYING from us.
So after months of trial-and-error with Google we decided it might be time to hire someone. The first thing we decided is to approach every prospective company with two simultaneous requests, from seperate subsidiaries. One RFQ for our "high profile" site that we needed a quote on, and another RFQ for a seperate website without an Alexa ranking.
Time after time, the quote was 2, 3, 4, even once 10x higher for the site with an alexa ranking in the top 250,000.
These people are scum.
So we decied that hey, we're no slouches. If **these people** can learn this trade, than we can too. So we did. And now we're number 1 organically on the our first and third most important phrases and number 3 on our second and fifth most important. We're still working on that "number 4." But we did this without SPENDING A DIME. And, I admit, we had a little help from Jagger. Especially Jagger 3. All my love to Matt Cutts and his family this glorius season.
The moral of the story: Caveot Emptor. These people don't know anything that isn't readily available if you're willing to spend the time. It's not trivial but if you're worrying about SEO then you've probably mastered things more difficult then this.
And, a tip: Most of these SEO guys have a copy of "Boiler Room" for home and an extra one for the office. Once you call them and make contact, play a little coy. Make him think his usual pitch will work on you. See, he's going to want to prove that he's got this encyclopedic knowledge that justifies his $15,000 quote. If you just shut up and let him talk, he'll explain everything to you. Every phone call-- and this can be many. These sales guys will talk to you as long as you let them-- can yeild real nuggets of useful knowledge. And it's all totally free. Just ask a lot of open-ended questions and prepare to wade thru some BS.
Shane
yeah. but "black hats" should be called what they are, not this shitty euphemism they use for themselves. they are search engine SPAMMERS, nothing more. they rank with that email-scum down there, in the sewer...
But the SEOs who do most of the promotion about the SEO business are really the black-hats, building link farms and similer techniques to lie to the robots, making them think your boring pages are interesting to humans, so the robots will lie to the humans who want to find interesting pages. It's dishonest, and it screws up the value of search engines for the users, and good luck to Google in finding them and stopping them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't understand why you use the euhpemism "Search Engine Optimization", when the rest of us call it by it's true name - "SPAM".
What the heck is going on here?
Maybe someone should sign up with the nick "* * * Abc" and submit stories like mad to see if the Slashdot editors just pick the first nick with a somewhat interesting story...
Clever signature text goes here.
Zach is quite correct that it's about money - if you do a Google search for "rolex watches", for instance, the first five or so entries (other than the advertising section) appear to be legitimate, and the rest appear to be various sites put together by scammers who are trying to SEO themselves into the highest ranking by writing inane content and playing link games. (Fortunately, I don't want to buy such an ungeeky watch, but I do often want to find out technical information about various medicines, and that often gets swamped by SEO-spammer medicine stores. Bad enough that it's hard to find articles on how drug X interacts with drug Y, because even the legitimate sites will have indexes on their pages pointing to their articles about drugs A-Z, but if either drug is something that's heavily promoted for sale on the web, that increases the probability of your search drowning in spam.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I maintain (content wise) several web sites.
And for some strange reasons it is indeed necessary to optimize them, or they don't show up in the first page at google.
Example: www.jiyukan.de or www.aikido-karlsruhe.de. Same site, seconod is forwarded to first. When you google "Aikido Karlsruhe" the site did not show up on the first page of search results for ages. Until an expert figured how to optimize it.
The anoying thing is:
a) the other search results never had anything to do with "priacticing Aikido in the town Karlsruhe" nor did they have anything to do with martial arts or Karlsruhe but where jsut random search results.
b) If you don't change the content of the page every few weeks it drops from the first page of search results? Why? The teachers are fix, the training times are fix, every information on that page does not change. But we are artificially forced to change it, or people googling for it won't find it.
This fucking site is about one of the 5 only Aikido dojos in the town Karlsruhe and around. As long as no other side has both terms "Aikido" and "Karlsruhe" close together in their content they should not show up at all.
Anyway, as long as ranking gets more and more complex there is a business in boosting/manipulating rankings.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
An unoptimized site is the equivalent of Spanglish. Yes, it's written in a way the audience can understand, but it isn't written with proper Spanish grammar. So, going through a site and making all the verbs and nouns agree and removing all of the slang is really all optimization is:
-make it valid HTML
-add your metatags
-link to other valid sources of similar data
-get them to link to you
-add yourself to http://dmoz.org/
While, yes, I admit that the skill is in getting the site to be standards compliant while not breaking the design, and in knowing how to write the best metatags, anyone offering anything more than that might as well be selling the Brooklyn Bridge.
Where candidates win elections by paying operatives to secretly affect the casting and counting of votes.
It is the present state of American politics, but it's not democracy.
And it's tragic that anyone could ever confuse the two.
Election results by Diebooooooold.
Margaret Thatcher.
WOW, Beatles has such an awesome site I of course wanted to make a backup in case it ever goes down. Of course I want my backup to be have only the most recent data, so I keep my backups as fresh as possible. I also make backups of similar amazing sites strangers sometime send me links to via email...
:repeat
Maybe someone could help me out. Normally I let this run at night...
site-backup-list.txt
http://george-harrison.info/
http://othersites.example.com/
make-backup-sites.bat
wget -r -l 999 --proxy=off -i site-backup-list.txt
goto repeat
Sadly, george-harrison.info returns 503 Unknown Site errors to wget. Does someone know how I may be able to make backups of their site in an automated fasion, preferrably from the command line?
Let's say you're looking for a search engine optimizer. You go to google. You type in "search engine optimizer" and you get 10 results. Are you going to go for the 8th??? Obviously they suck.
#!/bin/sh
while [ 1 ]
do
wget -r -l 999 --proxy=off -i site-backup-list.txt
done
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Because redirects and popups obliterate other browsers?
Look, I don't like sites that offer "anti-spyware" with misleading popups either, but just because you get redirected to one of those sites doesn't mean your machine is getting exploited.
And BTW, I'd recommend getting a new machine wit NX support (A64 is good). It prevents IE being exploited on this bug, it'll just crash like Firefox does on this exploit although you'll get a more informative error message than you would with Firefox (unless you had NX). Also, if you get a machine with NX, make sure to turn it on for Firefox, by default in Windows, it is only on for MS Apps (like Explorer and OE).
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I don't think all SEO specialists employ both ethical and unethical techniques. You've made an awfully broad generalization, and I can understand why, but I used to do a lot of SEO work, and I've come to a different conclusion.
They are trying to figure out how to cheat the system.
There's an awful lot you can do without resorting to "cheating the system," that can have a very positive long-term effect for your search engine position. The basics:
Use of a robots.txt tag
Use of meta description tags
Writing of copy that more accurately emphasizes the products you're trying to sell
Manually submitting a site to numerous search engines and using optimized copy in each submission
Contacting partner companies and asking them to link to your site?
There are a lot of SEO specialists who act unethically, but I don't buy the argument that all of them do. For one thing, it is possible to obtain excellent SEO results without doing anything unethical, using the techniques I listed above.
In my experience, many companies have done nothing to optimize their sites for search engines. This applies to a lot of technology companies you would think are all over SEO. There are also situations where entrants into a market have a huge disadvantage because of the longevity of content and number of links the encumbents enjoy.
For example, I did some work once for a company that was a market leader in a new technology. They were attempting to get their name noticed, but had to compete against huge companies that competed not only in their market, but in several others. The client was at a distinct disadvantage because although their huge competitors were doing nothing new in the market, they were established and therefore had a lot of content that had been on the Web for a few years.
We figured out which keywords to target and began developing content that specifically incorporated those keywords. The important point here is that these keywords accurately reflected the content. There's no need to use bait-and-switch tactics if you actually have something to offer. Companies that rely on sleazy SEO techniques do so because they know they can't succeed on the merits of what they're offering. Companies that rely on legitimate SEO techniques have confidence that their content is worthwhile. Another thing to remember is that when companies employ legit SEO techniques and develop content accordingly, they are responding to demand from search engine users for that very content.
I'd suggest that SEO firms are like many other providers of specialized skills. Some percentage are above-board, and some are scumbags. I agree with you that the percentage of scumbags in the SEO industry is probably higher than in most. But when I did SEO work, I refused to work with a couple of clients because they wanted me to do shady things. I've had conversations with other SEO experts who have turned away clients for similar reasons.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
... the better your spelling, the more likely people will believe and listen to you (even if you have no idea what your are talking about).
All joking aside, SEO sounds evil, but for the most part, is not that bad. It is really better to look at SEO as not just a way of making your ranking higher on most SEs, but really finding out why your ranking is lower than what it could be.
http://www.webceo.com/cgi-bin/go/ clickthru.cgi?id=indymike
:)
Well, at least I know that you know what you're talking about
PageRank can incorporate interpreted Adsense data... Google will obviously discourage advertising on scraper sites--legit advertisers will be looking for reputable placement, the side-effect: internet purged of the SEO junk. But who knows--if you're dumb enough to run an SEO scam, maybe you'll be dumb enough to buy your own traffic to boost organic results ;)
Sounds like the name of some bad daytime TV show.
"Her idea of wit is nothing more than an incisive observation humorously phrased and delivered with impeccable timing."
.. just remove every single page from their records that is just a list of links. A hell of a lot of times I've gone looking for something only to get a page linking to another page linking to another page and so forth.
If you use alt= in the right way (for text that replaces an image that fails to load), you can still get IE's tooltip behavior by putting the longer description in title=. Heck, if you want to get an even longer description, put a URL in longdesc=.
The only way to counter this effect is to have a larger base (i.e. at least more the 50%) of educated and critical thinking people in a society. And maybe for the first time in history we might have the chance to get closer to this goal.
This may very well be true, but they also need to be motivated. It doesn't matter how smart a voter is if he's apathetic to the whole process.
This is why I believe the USA needs to seriously consider alternative voting methods such as Approval Voting, Single Transferable Vote (STV), or The Borda Count. There are many others as well, and I haven't formed an opinion as to which is best, but almost all of them allow the voter to more accurately express his/her opinion, which is the holy grail of voting.
The current system of "Here are the candidates, pick one" forces the voter to make strategic choices like "I like candidate A best, but candidate B is the only one with a realistic chance of beating candidate C, so I guess I should vote for candidate B.".
Under the alternatives, the voter can express his or her interest in both A and B.
Now if there is one thing bad about Firefox with Adblock, it's that I don't know when I am supposed to hate the current website for their shady business practices. :D