"A 1Ghz processor with 1 gig of RAM is no longer adequate? That's ridiculous! And yet, that is where we are at today."
1 gig of ram is no longer adequate???
I don't know what "noncritical" apps you use, but I have a AMD 2200 with 512 of ram. I run both XP and Suse on it and I very rarely use up the ram or cpu and I run lot's of python apps. I program python and php for a living.
There are a lot of details that complicate your pure vision but I really don't have time to go tit for tat about it. Here is one example: I buy advertising for my site. This means someone gives me links from their sites, not with the intention of ranking higher, but it has this effect anyway. This undermines the public good as you like to say, but I didn't mean to buy a higher ranking. I was just trying to buy advertising. Does this mean advertising in this form is unethical.
"Well, in the sense that I can pay for a high ranking, in this sense it is based on money. I mean it is an industry right? Perhaps optimization itself does not cost too much money, however its definately true that I can pay for links from a site with a high page rank. Isn't this how it works?"
Not exactly. You can buy links, but you have to do a lot more to rank and stay there. Link farms are blacklisted for the most part and don't work. I don't want to get into all the details, I just wanted to try and show that SEO and the ethics of it aren't as black and white as is percieved. I agree with you in general, as I said, but I think reality has a lot more gray than your vision of right and wrong.
Another point, google and search engines aren't the only way to find content on the internet. Word of mouth still works great if you actually have something of value. Let's use your blog analogy. If you make a blog today, and there were no SEO's, you still wouldn't rank in the search engines because no one links to you. How will you get visitors to your site?
I agree with your overall point of view, but I think you make some logical leaps that don't hold up. You imply that SEO is bad because we have corporate controlled media. This simply makes no sense. This assertion requires SEO ablility to be based on money. i.e. the only way to rank is by having lots of money. This simply isn't true. SEO techniques require very little money. You could have all of your sites ranking if you knew how! I agree with you in general though.
I put "sneaky" in quotes because I don't believe it's sneaky, but there seems to be a general feeling that all SEO is sneaky. The tactics I was talking about were link exchanges and buying links along with optimizing site content.
However, we've gotten away from the important point. Complaining isn't going to make it go away. We need a technical solution if that is even possible.
Your missing the point. What you describe is unethical, but that is not all SEO. The point I'm trying to make is that there is ok SEO and bad SEO. Let's not lump it all together.
"but its unethical because you are purposefuly undermining (I'm taking this as an assumption) a metric that is being used for the common good."
Um, I think you are way off on this one. Are you saying that exchanging links is unethical? Is putting keywords in the title unethical? Define undermining? If I sell candles, and I try to boost my rankings for candles, is that unethical?
I'm not sure why they don't do that and for all I konw they might be doing it. If they are they aren't doing much of it because I see a lot of cloaked pages.
"Are you claiming that there is nothing unethical that can be done to gain serps?"
No, and I'll give you an example. A lot of unethical SEO's will literally steal your content. You'll spend a lot of time writing good content and someone will scrape your site and use your costly content for themselves. This is cleary wrong.
However, a lot of people around here seem to believe that doing anything to affect your ranking is wrong. I think most/.ers have an oversimplified view of the SEO world and how it works. I'm trying to make the point that there are SEO techniques that are ok, and some of the ones people complain about may in fact be ok if they put some thought into it. A lot of it isn't any less moral than normal marketing. Link exchanges, buying links, etc.
Because someone can just report their competitors as spam over and over and over again.
Also, if there are a few billion sites then it would take a lot of man power, and money, to manually filter it. Yahoo tried and it didn't work.
So in your world no one would put any effort into affecting their search rankings other than making a good site! They would never trade links or anything.
Unfortunately that world doesn't exist. I can only live in this world as it is and if I want to sell online then I have to do seo. Here's another question for you. What if I have a site that provides value to users. Maybe I sell candles and have a wide assortment. I think pay someone to get me traffic via SEO. A user then goes to google and searches for 'trapp candles' because they want to buy some candles. I show up because of my 'sneaky' tactics, they come to my site, find want they want, and leave a happy customer. Is this wrong?
I do this for a living and word density is a slight factor. You can't rank for something if the keyword isn't on the page. Someone that has the keyword on their page a few times will rank higher than someone that only has the keyword once (all else being equal). This doesn't mean that putting the keyword 100 times helps you. It actually hurts you, but you knew that already. That's why I said "a certain number of times" in my previous post. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I don't want to give away my secrets.
That is an interesting question? Here's another one.
Is it unethical to make a site specifically for marketing? Where is the line drawn? Slashdot makes money from advertising as do most SEO's. What's the difference? What's the difference between what SEO's do and putting up billboards on the side of the road?
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. It doesn't have much to do with html. h1 tags and such play a slight role, but ptimizing content for search engines is about having the keywords a certain number of times in content taht is of a certain size.
SEO's use thousands of domains. If they block one they have plenty more. There are far too many for google to handle via manual review. The SEO's also use different ip's, different servers, etc. This is simply an arms race between the evolution of the search engines algorithms and the SEO's ability to manipulate the changes made by the search engines.
This isn't true. The content that ranks the best isn't the content that reads the best.
It's hard to compete when your content isn't optimized.
Some sites get around this by showing an optimized page to the search engines and another, more readable page, to users. Unfortunately, a nonoptimized page can't compete with an optimized page if the PR of the two sites are the same.
mod_rewrite is the greatest thing since sliced bread;)
"Are link exchanges just another example of exploiting a flaw in google?"
I think your asking the wrong question. The correct question would be:
Is there an algorithm that can't be manipulated?
The answer is no so we will always have SEO's. It's just an arms race we have to live with and the best search engine is the one that stays a few steps ahead of the others and this is google for the time being.
There is too much money to be made from high rankings to expect this to go away.
I work in the seo industry and it's far easier to manipulate yahoo and msn than google. This translates into better search results which is why I still use google for my searching. Having said that, google's results have degraded over time as seo's have gotten better at manipulating google. Unfortunately we live in a world that revolves around marketing and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I've been using php5 for a while now. I started developing a blogging site and decided to use php5 because I had no compelling reason not to. So far so good. The only down side is that I really miss having exceptions when I'm coding php4 at work:(
This is stupid ane here is why.
1. This does nothing. It only takes up one spot on the google rankings so everyone will just keep blog spamming for the other 9.
2. It brings more publicity to the fact that blog spamming works and will probably lead to more blog spamming.
The spammers may even spam more to compete with the wiki page;)
For most basic day to day use (e-mail, web browsing, typing up a letter and printing it) Linux is a fine desktop environment needing little tweaking
Printing? Are you sure. Setting up printing in linux isn't too hard, given you have a linux friendly printer, but it isn't nearly as easy as plugging it in. When I setup my printer on suse 9.1 I had to give permissions for non root users to print to the printer.
However, I think there is another important issue for linux on the desktop that people seem to forget. What happens when you want to change hardware. How does linux handle booting up with a different video card than the one that it was installed on? I've never done this, so I'm curious to know how well most distros handle this sort of thing. What about when I stick in another hard drive?
*nix will NEVER SUCCED UNTILL IT DOES SOMETHING I CARE ABOUT (I = normal people like me)
we do not care about bloat or saving a few hundred meg, or about the evil MS empire or about eulas or about open source or any of that stuff; it is irrelevant
Will normal people like you care when you start a business and find that you have to spend $10,000 to put sql server on your dual proc server?
The alternative is using postgres for free.
Also, I don't think normal users determine what succeeds. Apple computers were easier to use than windows back in the day. If your logic were true we would all be using macs right now. My guess is that normal people used windows because they used it at work and were familiar with it. My first paragraph shows why linux is a good choice for businesses, and my guess is that people will evetually by linux machines because that's what they use at work.
"They spam messageboards. How, exactly, is that avoiding people's frustration?"
If a spammer keeps hitting a board/blog after their posts get deleted then they are amateurs. It's a waste of resources.
Slashdot Mirror
"A 1Ghz processor with 1 gig of RAM is no longer adequate? That's ridiculous! And yet, that is where we are at today."
1 gig of ram is no longer adequate??? I don't know what "noncritical" apps you use, but I have a AMD 2200 with 512 of ram. I run both XP and Suse on it and I very rarely use up the ram or cpu and I run lot's of python apps. I program python and php for a living.
There are a lot of details that complicate your pure vision but I really don't have time to go tit for tat about it. Here is one example: I buy advertising for my site. This means someone gives me links from their sites, not with the intention of ranking higher, but it has this effect anyway. This undermines the public good as you like to say, but I didn't mean to buy a higher ranking. I was just trying to buy advertising. Does this mean advertising in this form is unethical. "Well, in the sense that I can pay for a high ranking, in this sense it is based on money. I mean it is an industry right? Perhaps optimization itself does not cost too much money, however its definately true that I can pay for links from a site with a high page rank. Isn't this how it works?" Not exactly. You can buy links, but you have to do a lot more to rank and stay there. Link farms are blacklisted for the most part and don't work. I don't want to get into all the details, I just wanted to try and show that SEO and the ethics of it aren't as black and white as is percieved. I agree with you in general, as I said, but I think reality has a lot more gray than your vision of right and wrong.
Is exchaning links unethical in your book?
Another point, google and search engines aren't the only way to find content on the internet. Word of mouth still works great if you actually have something of value. Let's use your blog analogy. If you make a blog today, and there were no SEO's, you still wouldn't rank in the search engines because no one links to you. How will you get visitors to your site? I agree with your overall point of view, but I think you make some logical leaps that don't hold up. You imply that SEO is bad because we have corporate controlled media. This simply makes no sense. This assertion requires SEO ablility to be based on money. i.e. the only way to rank is by having lots of money. This simply isn't true. SEO techniques require very little money. You could have all of your sites ranking if you knew how! I agree with you in general though.
I put "sneaky" in quotes because I don't believe it's sneaky, but there seems to be a general feeling that all SEO is sneaky. The tactics I was talking about were link exchanges and buying links along with optimizing site content.
However, we've gotten away from the important point. Complaining isn't going to make it go away. We need a technical solution if that is even possible.
Your missing the point. What you describe is unethical, but that is not all SEO. The point I'm trying to make is that there is ok SEO and bad SEO. Let's not lump it all together.
"but its unethical because you are purposefuly undermining (I'm taking this as an assumption) a metric that is being used for the common good."
Um, I think you are way off on this one. Are you saying that exchanging links is unethical? Is putting keywords in the title unethical? Define undermining? If I sell candles, and I try to boost my rankings for candles, is that unethical?
I'm not sure why they don't do that and for all I konw they might be doing it. If they are they aren't doing much of it because I see a lot of cloaked pages.
"Are you claiming that there is nothing unethical that can be done to gain serps?" No, and I'll give you an example. A lot of unethical SEO's will literally steal your content. You'll spend a lot of time writing good content and someone will scrape your site and use your costly content for themselves. This is cleary wrong.
/.ers have an oversimplified view of the SEO world and how it works. I'm trying to make the point that there are SEO techniques that are ok, and some of the ones people complain about may in fact be ok if they put some thought into it. A lot of it isn't any less moral than normal marketing. Link exchanges, buying links, etc.
However, a lot of people around here seem to believe that doing anything to affect your ranking is wrong. I think most
Because someone can just report their competitors as spam over and over and over again. Also, if there are a few billion sites then it would take a lot of man power, and money, to manually filter it. Yahoo tried and it didn't work.
So in your world no one would put any effort into affecting their search rankings other than making a good site! They would never trade links or anything.
Unfortunately that world doesn't exist. I can only live in this world as it is and if I want to sell online then I have to do seo. Here's another question for you. What if I have a site that provides value to users. Maybe I sell candles and have a wide assortment. I think pay someone to get me traffic via SEO. A user then goes to google and searches for 'trapp candles' because they want to buy some candles. I show up because of my 'sneaky' tactics, they come to my site, find want they want, and leave a happy customer. Is this wrong?
I don't think your logic holds up. How are the rankings stolen from? Why do they deserve it? How should rankings be determined?
I do this for a living and word density is a slight factor. You can't rank for something if the keyword isn't on the page. Someone that has the keyword on their page a few times will rank higher than someone that only has the keyword once (all else being equal). This doesn't mean that putting the keyword 100 times helps you. It actually hurts you, but you knew that already. That's why I said "a certain number of times" in my previous post. It's a bit more complicated than that, but I don't want to give away my secrets.
This is true to a degree. The thing is that a lot of SEO's don't redirect. Here's an example http://www.xboxgamer.info/
That is an interesting question? Here's another one. Is it unethical to make a site specifically for marketing? Where is the line drawn? Slashdot makes money from advertising as do most SEO's. What's the difference? What's the difference between what SEO's do and putting up billboards on the side of the road?
It's a no-no, but it's widely done and google doesn't usually find out unless the site gets reported. This doesn't happen too often.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. It doesn't have much to do with html. h1 tags and such play a slight role, but ptimizing content for search engines is about having the keywords a certain number of times in content taht is of a certain size.
SEO's use thousands of domains. If they block one they have plenty more. There are far too many for google to handle via manual review. The SEO's also use different ip's, different servers, etc. This is simply an arms race between the evolution of the search engines algorithms and the SEO's ability to manipulate the changes made by the search engines.
This isn't true. The content that ranks the best isn't the content that reads the best.
;)
It's hard to compete when your content isn't optimized. Some sites get around this by showing an optimized page to the search engines and another, more readable page, to users. Unfortunately, a nonoptimized page can't compete with an optimized page if the PR of the two sites are the same.
mod_rewrite is the greatest thing since sliced bread
"Are link exchanges just another example of exploiting a flaw in google?"
I think your asking the wrong question. The correct question would be: Is there an algorithm that can't be manipulated?
The answer is no so we will always have SEO's. It's just an arms race we have to live with and the best search engine is the one that stays a few steps ahead of the others and this is google for the time being. There is too much money to be made from high rankings to expect this to go away.
I work in the seo industry and it's far easier to manipulate yahoo and msn than google. This translates into better search results which is why I still use google for my searching. Having said that, google's results have degraded over time as seo's have gotten better at manipulating google. Unfortunately we live in a world that revolves around marketing and I don't see that changing any time soon.
I've been using php5 for a while now. I started developing a blogging site and decided to use php5 because I had no compelling reason not to. So far so good. The only down side is that I really miss having exceptions when I'm coding php4 at work :(
This is stupid ane here is why. 1. This does nothing. It only takes up one spot on the google rankings so everyone will just keep blog spamming for the other 9. 2. It brings more publicity to the fact that blog spamming works and will probably lead to more blog spamming. The spammers may even spam more to compete with the wiki page ;)
Also, I don't think normal users determine what succeeds. Apple computers were easier to use than windows back in the day. If your logic were true we would all be using macs right now. My guess is that normal people used windows because they used it at work and were familiar with it. My first paragraph shows why linux is a good choice for businesses, and my guess is that people will evetually by linux machines because that's what they use at work.
"They spam messageboards. How, exactly, is that avoiding people's frustration?" If a spammer keeps hitting a board/blog after their posts get deleted then they are amateurs. It's a waste of resources.