Slashdot Mirror
The Dirty Little Secrets of Search
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The NY Times has an interesting story (reg. may be required) about how JCPenney used link farms to become the number one google search result for such terms as 'dresses,' 'bedding,' and 'samsonite carry on luggage' and what Google did to them when they found out. 'Actually, it's the most ambitious attempt I've ever heard of,' says Doug Pierce, an expert in online search. 'This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You'd think they would have people around them that would know better.'"
The whole idea of an SEO budget is to push your name out to the top line of google, bing or anything else people use to search.
The intent was to game the system. And by doing so, make a ton of money. There are no laws for internet search ... unless you can use trademark laws to push a competitor who's doing that to your brand name.
Unscrupulous yes, ruthless yes, but that is the true face of capitalism anyway. Google can try regulating, but only enough to make the same people put in pennies into their sidebar offering of less-worth, but clearly marked advertising.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
News at 11.
Reasonably written article.
If you already know the ins and outs of search or have no interest in it's specifics you can spare yourself the read, though. Ymmv.
Karma? What's that again?
This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.
Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy
I suspect this is a case of a company trying to play the same games they play in meatspace. Basically is boils down to "follow the letter of the law, not the spirit" with a pinch of of bending the letter of the law every now and then under the assumption that their size and influence will make those upholding the law ignore their transgressions. Unfortunately for them that's not how the "laws" of the internet work...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I see they are currently #1 on bing for Comforters and #4 for dresses. I wonder if it would be possible for the search engines share data on who is cheating?
I'm actually really surprised by the article, that it took so few sites to affect results and that such obviously off-topic links still helped. I thought the algorithms were already smarter than that.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
The job of a search engine is to find web pages that are interesting to people, and it does that job by using a lot of robots with models about what's interesting. If you've got a web site you want the search engine to tell people is interesting, you can either do that honestly, by making it actually interesting, or dishonestly, by lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting, and sometimes that's cheaper and easier because robots only have models.
To the extent that there are "white hat SEOs", they're either doing the basic web design jobs of making sure that your information is findable (e.g. putting the keywords in text, not in images played by flash animation that other web designers told you would look cool), or else they're doing editorial work by telling you to write more interesting web content. For the most part, those people don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "editors" or "graphic designers", though there are some companies that really do need to hire somebody to clean up bad web design.
Real SEOs are the black-hat types, who'll offer to get results for you by methods other than making your web site actually more interesting. They're lying scum, but sometimes they're good enough at lying to robots that they get results. Unfortunately, one of the big results they get is garbage all over the web, from link spam in blog comments to garbage that search engines find that's really just copying bits of content to attract advertising. Makes the web as a whole a lot less interesting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Copying a New York Times article wholesale, and then using a Slashdot post to bait-and-switch readers into visiting your website rather than the Times?
Ballsy.
Doing so when the article's content is about using malicious links to artificially inflate your site's visibility?
Just. Not. Cool.
The original NY TImes article is here. Whether you approve of the Times' registration policy or not, you shouldn't support people who steal their content and use it to make money.
This is one of those press events which gives CEOs nightmares.
There's been press criticism of Google before, but it's mostly been anecdotal - blogs, op-eds, and other commentary. This time, there's real reporting, with the New York Times naming names.
Usually, after criticism, Google says nothing, or perhaps replies in a blog posting. Google people rarely speak in forums that they don't control. This time, Matt Cutts had to sit down with New York Times reporters for an hour long interrogation.
Google's vaunted claims that they can detect link spam were shown to be false. Google didn't catch the spam, the New York Times did. Then Google made an algorithm change and claimed that fixed most of the problem. The Times tracked Google's results and showed that it didn't. Only a "manual action" moved J.C. Penny down.
Now the rest of the business press is going to take a hard look at search. Expect follow-up articles in Bloomberg, Fortune, etc. Google management has weeks of pain ahead. After their feud with Microsoft last week, their troubles with European antitrust regulators, and Blekko nipping at their heels, they didn't need this. Attention may be focused on those "manual actions". Should those be published? The European Union has specifically asked for that data, and Google can no longer deny that it exists.
I've been critical of Google's anti-spam efforts, mostly on the Places side.I thought they were better at detecting link farms of junk sites, though. That's old-school SEO. If they missed this, they have worse problems than I'd thought.
No. There are mom & pops who get suckered into SEO promises on a daily basis. There are two kinds of customers who use SEO: those who don't know any better, or are unaware their "designer" is engaging in black hat SEO, and those who entertain the idea for a while and decide to take the risk.
Those who risk black hat SEO
Here's the situation: unless you are in a totally saturated market it is extremely easy to achieve high placement organic search results if you follow Google's guidelines. You don't have to cheat at all but you do have to pay careful attention to having relevant content, clean HTML, and following accessibility guidlines helps a great deal as well. Don't spam your META tags but don't ignore them either.
We've had a couple clients leave to go with SEO specialists who happen to also build web sites, because we do web development but take advantage of Google's recommendations in the process. One client in particular - we'll just refer to him as P. for now, kept asking us about SEO every time traffic power contacted him (always under a new and different operating name because as you know every time Google finds them they punt them from the index, along with all their clients). P. did listen to us about not going with that company but has been suckered by six or seven different independent "SEO consultants."
Now, P. is in a very competitive, saturated market but even so we had achieved respectable search results. We recommended he start submitting his product to third-party distributors and ask them to link back as part of the effort to increase distribution, maybe get a few contractors to exclusively rely on his products and link back to P.'s site, and maybe get a few independent review companies and labs (like Consumer Reports) to review his product, and they would of course link to his site in the review. We also recommended a good Google adwords campaign until his product achieved critical mass.
Another thing you need to know about P.: He is not frugal but he is cheap. He would phrase things like "can you do me a favor and. . . " or "how hard would it be to. . . " and try offering $100 or even as low as $25.00 for something that would require 20 hours or so to implement, test on a staging server, then back up the live server, deploy, and re-test. He just doesn't value anyone's time. I don't understand how but one of my partners had the patience to deal with him, but by the end my patience had long run out, and one time I asked P.: "Oh, you want that for $100? Say, can you come and $foo my $bar in three different $zags for $100.00? No? Then let me ask you this: why is it your time is so valuable, but no one else's is? (The truth is I wanted him gone since he kept one of our engineers on the phone hours each week picking his brain, under the guise of negotiating but unfortunately he was with us another two years. I also worded it a bit more diplomatically than that, but it was the general point). In fact it is my fault we ever got involved with P. in the first place. He suckered us and I believed he was having a hard time getting his product out there, so I convinced my partners to take him on and help him out, giving him a fully-populated web site for $1,200.00. It was based on OS Commerce to save ourselves time so the HTML output wasn't the cleanest but we explained the pros and cons to him up front, and he decided to go with it. Over time we cleaned up some of the HTML output but over the years he was with us he kept asking for better search results, and a nicer design. We would come back with a detailed quote including graphic design time, implementing the design and then development of the features he wanted, and even though we gave him a really good deal, he would come back with something about how the original site cost him only $1,200.00. (hint: don't ever do favors for a cheapskate; they never appreciate it)
Within a couple of years he was netting $360K per year. For a one-man shop doing what he is doing, competing
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50