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

+1, Ironic

[TheSpoom]

At least he's posting about something with which he has experience.

Re:+1, Ironic

[ManxStef]

Yeah, it's been talked about before and it's blatantly obvious what's going on: this guy's abusing Slashdot's unholy Pagerank power to boost his crappy spyware-filled Beatles page and ScuttleMonkey's in on it, happily posting everything he submits. Wonder how much the kickback is? (Considering how much some pay for SEO, it's probably a tidy sum.)

I thought it might be an honest mistake at first, but it's just happened way too many times now to be a co-incidence. And Slashdot wonders why they're losing readers left, right & centre to Digg? DO YOUR JOBS PROPERLY AND SORT YOUR DAMN EDITORS OUT!

Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention

[ReformedExCon]

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.

The bottom line...

[Cherita Chen]

The bottom line is this: If you mark your sites up so that they present the content in such a way as to accomidate most browsers, and be $html complient, you shouldn't have any problem getting seen. A good example is "Alt" tags. These are crucial for displaying your page in a text only browser such as links, e-links, lynx, etc...

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)?

What the devil is value these days?

[shanen]

Trying to keep it brief, but:

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?

Re:What the devil is value these days?

[aiken_d]

Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.

If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achieving market parity with real Rolexes, it's because, for the people buying them, they're the same thing. Or, at least, the people buying them have decided they'd rather have 1,000 chinese "rolexes" over their lifetime than a single real thing.

When you say the market is "broken," what you really mean is that the market is, well, the market. And that some (most) people disagree with your estimations of intrinsic value. In reality, the market can't be "broken" any more than the weather can be "broken" -- it's a complex system that may evolve in ways we don't like, but if people really didn't like it, they'd change their behavior and the market/weather would trend back to what people consider "normal."

Might as well declare that sports, music, or academia is "broken." Large, complex systems tend to evolve. Deal with it. Or at least realize that your ideas of intrinsic value may not be shared by all 5 billion other people on the planet.

-b