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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.
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!
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.