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NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the good-the-bad-and-the-dishonest dept.

* * 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."

2 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. +1, Ironic by TheSpoom · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Re:What the devil is value these days? by aiken_d · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    --
    If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.