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."

Comments

Different kinds of SEOs

[this great guy]

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:

• White hat SEOs, who help people redesign their websites to use robots.txt files, META tags, etc.
• Black hat SEOs, who spam the Web with thousands of links, and generally abuse the technology.

Only the second kind is evil. Other SEOs out there actually do good things and truly make the Web a better place.

Democracy

[nephridium]

This is why people like Socrates opposed democracy - lobbyists (i.e. people good at manipulating other people) can sway many of the less educated populace, which in ancient Greece (and actually all through history to this day) was the majority of citizens. And the worst part is that those lobbyists/demagogues/politicians etc. don't need to be very knowledgable themselves, they just need to be charismatic and very convincing. Socrates (and his disciple Plato) saw this as a huge danger for society (which would prove true often enough in history, take Hitler's rise to power as the most prominent example).

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.

Alexa Ranking

[TubeSteak]

Alexa's ranking is less relevant these days, but still informative.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? range=1m&size=large&url=http://george-harrison.inf o
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

Google Insight to Article ...

[hagrin]

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.

Re:+1, Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Want more insight into the mind of a PageRank player? Here's his user page. Note how the few posts he's made have been completely devoid of useful content, yet he makes copious use of BOLD AND CAPS to overemphasize whatever buzzwords he writes. Also note how his sole journal entry consists of lifting a few minor details from a Time article, including a few choice links to the appropriate content.

Re:+1, Ironic

[BillKaos]

The best info in that page is that 16 of 18 of his submissions were accepted by the same editor, ScuttleMonkey.

It's clear what's happening here.

Re:+1, Ironic

[BillKaos]

Sorry for replying to myself, but it's also worth noting that in the last history, about 50+ comments talking about this guy went (presumably by someone with enough power) modded offtopic.

Sometime is going on :)