I have been watching the search technology and SEO industry for a long time, since 95, and the inaccuracies in Mr. Seltzers' article point directly at his bias.
The recent linking tricks to get certain pages in results for a specific term have been done by a "group" of pages which are themselves high in the Google index. That it takes a concerted effort by a "group" of pages with a high PageRank to perpetrate this manipulation is testiment to the effectiveness of PageRank. That is how it is supposed to work.
This "group" has only exploited a known PageRank algorithm. In the end I wouldn't be surprised to find the pages perpetrating the manipulation are on "watch" status.
Mr. Seltzers' comments about Link farms and other linking tricks is not based in fact, but, is total conjecture. The lengths to which Google checks for this type of spam is an indication of their efforts to combat this type of spam. For instance I have a site at http://www.globalserve.net/~iwb/search/
if you go to google and search for search engine placements you'll see www.iprimus.ca/~iwb/search/
in the third spot. What is most interesting is iPrimus bought Globalserve and within about six months Google adjusted the URL on its own! The site still resolves for both addresees. Link farms are also directly contrary to submission guidelines at Google. To say Google is more easily manipulated using link farms than AV is assinine. Same color text as BG still works on AV. AV is dumb as a fencepost in it's picking up "THE" oldest spam tactic in the industry.
As to AltaVista making a comeback. Making that assumption on a few weeks traffic is a true indication of how much knowledge he has of the industry and a real indication of his bias. An old cooking term comes to mind when I think of AV "Stick a fork in it, it's done!" Just look in your logs, Googles' index may be driving more traffic than all the rest combined if you exclude Yahoo! 6% of the total traffic IMHO is not even worth making a concerted effort to get found there.
His comments about the abilty to filter results also points to a bias. The examples he used are algorithms which were implemented years ago when AV instantly indexed a site. They were added IMHO to make it easy to find pages already in the index, or finding pages linked to a site. I find it suspicious that someone with inside information about AV used a well known algorithm built into AV as an example. Do a plain vanilla search on the two sites and it is no contest, Google wins hands down. I'll say it again, AV is dumb as a fencepost and is years behind in the search technology race. It's search technology has not changed much in the 7 years I've been studying SE algorithms. It is the only major SE that can't handle frames, ? in querries or dynamic content of any kind!
Is it a surprise to anyone that Mr. Seltzer was once an employee of Digital and they owned AV at the time. Who owns it now, don't know, don't care, AV fell off my radar over a year ago.
As to freshness of the indexes and their ability to get/find fresh content. Google is far superior to AV. I have been using a no direct submission policy for a while. I choose to have engines find the site by reciprocal links and paid ads on sites with a high PageRank. Google has found most of these and added them to the index in weeks not months. AV has yet to find many of them. AVs' index, other than for sites in the Inclusion program, are woefully stale, incomplete and seldom re-indexed in any kind of meaningful way.
Sorry about the length of this I just have a real problem with articles steeped in bias, inaccuracies and out and out conjecture, not based on facts which are the result of any meaningful research.
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I have been watching the search technology and SEO industry for a long time, since 95, and the inaccuracies in Mr. Seltzers' article point directly at his bias. The recent linking tricks to get certain pages in results for a specific term have been done by a "group" of pages which are themselves high in the Google index. That it takes a concerted effort by a "group" of pages with a high PageRank to perpetrate this manipulation is testiment to the effectiveness of PageRank. That is how it is supposed to work. This "group" has only exploited a known PageRank algorithm. In the end I wouldn't be surprised to find the pages perpetrating the manipulation are on "watch" status. Mr. Seltzers' comments about Link farms and other linking tricks is not based in fact, but, is total conjecture. The lengths to which Google checks for this type of spam is an indication of their efforts to combat this type of spam. For instance I have a site at http://www.globalserve.net/~iwb/search/ if you go to google and search for search engine placements you'll see www.iprimus.ca/~iwb/search/ in the third spot. What is most interesting is iPrimus bought Globalserve and within about six months Google adjusted the URL on its own! The site still resolves for both addresees. Link farms are also directly contrary to submission guidelines at Google. To say Google is more easily manipulated using link farms than AV is assinine. Same color text as BG still works on AV. AV is dumb as a fencepost in it's picking up "THE" oldest spam tactic in the industry. As to AltaVista making a comeback. Making that assumption on a few weeks traffic is a true indication of how much knowledge he has of the industry and a real indication of his bias. An old cooking term comes to mind when I think of AV "Stick a fork in it, it's done!" Just look in your logs, Googles' index may be driving more traffic than all the rest combined if you exclude Yahoo! 6% of the total traffic IMHO is not even worth making a concerted effort to get found there. His comments about the abilty to filter results also points to a bias. The examples he used are algorithms which were implemented years ago when AV instantly indexed a site. They were added IMHO to make it easy to find pages already in the index, or finding pages linked to a site. I find it suspicious that someone with inside information about AV used a well known algorithm built into AV as an example. Do a plain vanilla search on the two sites and it is no contest, Google wins hands down. I'll say it again, AV is dumb as a fencepost and is years behind in the search technology race. It's search technology has not changed much in the 7 years I've been studying SE algorithms. It is the only major SE that can't handle frames, ? in querries or dynamic content of any kind! Is it a surprise to anyone that Mr. Seltzer was once an employee of Digital and they owned AV at the time. Who owns it now, don't know, don't care, AV fell off my radar over a year ago. As to freshness of the indexes and their ability to get/find fresh content. Google is far superior to AV. I have been using a no direct submission policy for a while. I choose to have engines find the site by reciprocal links and paid ads on sites with a high PageRank. Google has found most of these and added them to the index in weeks not months. AV has yet to find many of them. AVs' index, other than for sites in the Inclusion program, are woefully stale, incomplete and seldom re-indexed in any kind of meaningful way. Sorry about the length of this I just have a real problem with articles steeped in bias, inaccuracies and out and out conjecture, not based on facts which are the result of any meaningful research.