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SXSW: Google's Amit Singhal Talks SEO "Experts," Mobile, Search
Nerval's Lobster writes "Google senior vice president Amit Singhal, one of the executives heading up the company's search-engine operations, sat down with Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple and author, at one of this year's SXSW keynotes in Austin, TX. 'Our dream is for search to become the "Star Trek" computer, and that's what we're building today,' Singhal said. But he seemed reluctant to share much about his company on a more tactical level, parrying Kawasaki's queries about everything from the amount of code in Google's search platform to recent cyber-attacks on the company's systems. But the two did have an interesting back-and-forth about SEO. 'We at Google have time and time again said—and seen it happen—that if you build high-quality content that adds value, and your readers and your users seek you out, then you don't need to worry about anything else,' Singhal said. 'If people want that content, your site will automatically work you could make a bunch of SEO mistakes and it wouldn't hurt.' When Kawasaki followed up by asking, 'Is SEO bull****?' Singhal replied: 'That would be like saying marketing is bull****.' That drew a laugh from the audience—and maybe some gritted teeth from people who position themselves as SEO experts. The two talked about much more with regard to Google's future plans."
SEO - Search Engine Optimization.
#DeleteChrome
Since Marketing is bullshit that means SEO is bullshit too right?
Hey assholes, take Bill Hicks advice already.
You missed the one in the headline: South By South West
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Yes, sites with high quality content will succeed regardless of SEO tricks. But that's not what SEO is for. SEO is about getting clicks when your site has nothing useful to offer. And looking at the amount of rubbish I get in Google results (e.g. endless wikipedia copies) it is very successful.
The 10% of "SEO" that is "fixing your website" is fine - good even. Make your URL's friendly, make your site accessible (to both handicapped humans and robots), follow standards, validate your code, organize your pages, etc.
To the degree that any of the other 90% works, that's a bug Google should be (and usually is) actively fixing in their search ranking algorithms. In the meantime, thank goodness for Akismet for keeping the leeches away.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
OK, just at a basic level, but it's still all good advice.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34397
Well that's our experience too, visitors seek out our content, and find it on other people's scraped SEO sites.
It seems the web is full of sites that mechanically scrape a handful of related sites, merge pages to meet a keyword target and appear high in the google ranking, often higher than the sites they scrape.
Google doesn't of course let you report a site for copyright violation as an SEO spam site, because then they'd know about the copyright violation and would lose their DMCA protection (which requires the ISP have no prior knowledge of the infringement, so ISPs try to be wilfully ignorant about infringement unless you file a DMCA request, thus acknowledging their DMCA protection). So you can either file a DMCA notice with them, which isn't really what scraped copied spam is about, or you can do nothing.
Really I'd like to file a SPAM site report, because the fact a scraper ranks high isn't about copyright, it's about a crap scraper site ranking high! But the submission forms dead end if there's even the hint of a copyright problem, unless you file a DMCA takedown. Google then parade the DMCA takedown notices as a sort of badge of honor.
I can understand that there will be people who do SEO, just as their are people who do spamming, send junk mail, and phone scams aimed at vulnerable old people.
What I don't understand is how these people function within broader society? Do they lie about what they do? Do they hang out mostly with others of their kind? Are real people too cowardly to shun and loath them?
I've found that when you pay attention to accessability for non-sighted users the site is also more accessible to robots. This is probably a better approach to SEO because it helps humans at the same time as making a the content easily indexable.
'We at Google have time and time again said—and seen it happen—that if you build high-quality content that adds value, and your readers and your users seek you out, then you don't need to worry about anything else,'
What's Google for then?
Maybe Mr. Singhal, "one of the executives heading up the company's search-engine operations", needs to spend some time explaining why Google's search results suck so much and have gotten steadily worse. But that will never happen. Because then he might have to talk about what a lot of people already know -- shitty search results are good for Google's bottom line.
Shitty search results increase the number of links you click on, trying to find what you want, and if any of those links belong to people in Google's AdWords program, more clicks means more money for Google. Shitty search results also increase the chance that someone will click on one of the paid ads trying to find what they are looking for.
In my opinion, SEO is just one form of advertising, just like buying an ad in a phone book. I have done "SEO" professionally many times, but in my mind assume my employer wants more than just search engine optimization. It really comes down to being an online advertising expert, which is a real job. For example, determining the ROI (return on investment) on advertisements has real value for any business.
The problem is that the employers do not understand what SEO really means. If you are spending money on SEO, maybe you should spend money on advertisements as well and track everything to see what pays off. Run a small marketing experiment, find ads that make you money and then focus all your money into those ads.
In reality, SEO is usually just a one time short job of renaming directories,images & files, adding alt tags, and generally cleaning up HTML code to follow standards. Some companies charge monthly fees to post blog comments and other content regularly, which may actually help your site gain rank, but rarely is worth the monthly fee.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The summary should mention that Guy Kawasaki now works for Google: http://www.businessinsider.com/guy-kawasaki-joins-google-as-an-advisor-2013-2
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Google hit says search engine optimization. Is that it? Deliever a good site rather than trying to get people to find the shit you've made?
shit shit shiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!
It's the scummier things that some SEOs might do which make them the enemy of search engines - padding sites with meta tags, astroturfing, incestuously linking to the site from shill sites, hiring people to do automated +1 ranking, spamming forums & blogs with links, click jacking and any other scummy practice they can come up with. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these tactics actually count against a site's relevance if they are discovered.
Google, if you provide high-quality results that add value, people will seek you out instead of fleeing to competitors. Your results are getting useless, Google! I searched for "Barker" the other day and got results for "Baker". Your results are so sloppy and useless that I am looking for other sites. Forget SEO and Star Trek and get back to your core search functionality. Revert your code base back to 2008, when searches were more exact and the unary + still worked. Throw out the sloppy results and let people search for precise terms again. Let me know when you're done, because I'll be looking for alternatives. Better get your house in order while you're still relevant.
The converse of the "If people want that content, your site will automatically work" argument is well proven by Truemors and Alltop.
Why would Google would hire this two-bit hack...?