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

4 easy steps to profit!

[SecureTheNet]

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

Oops

[aiken_d]

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

Does Newsweek break the Back button on purpose?

[windowpain]

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?

Thanks for the mention, again

[randfish]

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.

**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware?

[Tim C]

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.

We shopped for an SEO

[shaneh0]

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

Most of the Money is in the Black Hat side

[billstewart]

It's possible to make money as a white hat SEO, doing a couple of things

• Showing your client how to use META tags for their keywords, and similar labelling so search engines can find the right information about your site, which should take about an hour's billable work, and that's not why you go into the SEO business.
• Actually doing the work for them, which may take a bit longer, and may be an ongoing business relationship if they change content often enough.
• Teaching them how to write interesting useful content so their website's worth visiting - that's like being an editor and writing coach and advertising consultant, and that's actual value you're providing if they're interested. You could actually make money doing this, and if calling yourself an SEO is how you hook your client, well, then call yourself that, but that's not really what you're doing.

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.

Unethical? Perhaps, but necessary!!

[angel'o'sphere]

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