NewsWeek Looks at Search Engine Optimization 147
* * 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."
+1, Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
-1, I wanted to say that. (Score:2, Interesting)
+1 Funny (Score:5, Funny)
Re:+1 Funny (Score:1, Funny)
Re:+1 Funny (Score:2)
I'm not much for arm-pulling. I find a bullet to the base of the brain quite effective though.
Negotiating axes also come in handy...to make it clear my terms are quite reasonable.
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
It's clear what's happening here.
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Informative)
Sometime is going on :)
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:2)
I'm not bitter, but our friend had THREE (the bolding is a joke) stories accepted on Nov 28 alone. Three in one day? Was there no one else submitting stories? (I did not, but still.) To assume that this man/woman does not get preferential treatment is quite base.
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:1)
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought it might be an honest mistake at first, but it's just happened way too many times now to be a co-incidence. And Slashdot wonders why they're losing readers left, right & centre to Digg? DO YOUR JOBS PROPERLY AND SORT YOUR DAMN EDITORS OUT!
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:2)
Re:+1, Ironic (Score:1)
Care to back that attribution up? Clever phrase, but still...Ambrose Bierce? Really?
Cheers,
Matt
Mirroring is disabled? (Score:2)
Maybe someone could help me out. Normally I let this run at night...
site-backup-list.txt
http://george-harrison.info/ [george-harrison.info]
http://othersites.example.com/ [example.com]
make-backup-sites.bat
wget -r -l 999 --proxy=off -i
Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:3, Informative)
For businesses, it gets you seen. Few people are going to try to look at anything beyond the first page or two of search results. Therefore, if you are #35 on the listings for a keyword vital to you, you're going to get a lot less traffic. If you are a business, and you have 5 competitors selling X, then whenever someone Googles X, your goal is to be the first website they see (aside from X.com or whatever the parent company is).
For non business organizations, i
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:1)
Just to throw a few pennies at you, any political organization that doesn't make some sort of room for business isn't really going to get terribly far. Business is a natural organizational tool for people, you know. I'm not saying replicate the current climate, obviously, but you can't be straight up opposed and successful at the same time. It's just not possible.
The key thing to
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:2)
A) I made it two days ago. I'm a college student, give me time over winter break.
B) This was mostly to make the point in an ironic manner.
I never said business people weren't people, I just said they aren't the only people.
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:1, Flamebait)
I don't think it's possible for an honest man to get far in business. The honest ones never row past the mom and pop corner store stage. That's why I always try to shop at the small guys.
Lying to Robots for Profit, not just for fun (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
Re:Uninteresting content gets undeserved attention (Score:2)
In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results,...
I wish this were true. In fact, it might be true if there weren't so many people trying to game the search engines. However, the way it is now, if you don't take steps to keep your ranking in shape you'll find the gamers will have pushed you off into the back pages...
4 easy steps to profit! (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [only999.com]
Alexa Ranking (Score:5, Informative)
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
Alexa linking (Score:2)
What the heck is going on here?
Maybe someone should sign up with the nick "* * * Abc" and submit stories like mad to see if the Slashdot editors just pick the first nick with a somewhat interesting story...
Re:Alexa linking (Score:2)
But yea, lots of crap link farms are pointing to george-harrison.
Re:Alexa Ranking (Score:2)
Re:4 easy steps to profit! (Score:2, Informative)
The bottom line... (Score:4, Insightful)
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)?
Re:The bottom line...ASS..U..MES (Score:1)
Re:The bottom line... (Score:2)
Unless, of course, someone is an artist who just wants his work [darkicon.com] to be seen and enjoyed by others (or a photographer, or a fledgling game designer [darkicon.com], etc.). Suddenly, text-only browsers don't seem so relevent -- a flowery description inside an Alt tag just ain't the same.
Mind you, I'm not saying text-only browsers have no use (of course they do!), just that they have very lim
Re:The bottom line... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The bottom line... (Score:2)
Re:The bottom line... (Score:2)
What the devil is value these days? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
I regard you as hypocritical and stupid, but that's okay. Reality is terribly persistent, and I remain confident that there is such a thing as intrinsic value even beyond the ability to lie convincingly. I
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
jes sayin'.
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
On t
Re: (Score:2)
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:1)
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me just check what you are saying in your post...
"Curse... Generalise... Insult... Self-righteousness. And now I've run out of cohesive arguments, I'd like no replies and to take my ball away because I'm not winning".
Come back when you've got a cohesive argument with regards to intrinsic value beyond "I remain confid
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:1)
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:1)
Come back when you're ready to have a rational discussion on a subject - you might learn something from talking to people with an alternative view.
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:1)
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
Any chance you could lay of the expletives for a minute, calm down and actually argue your case, rather than just calling people names when they disagree with you?
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
However, I have concluded that it is essentially always a waste of time to have discussions with extremists. There are two reasons for having a discussion. One is to seek clarification of the position. However, I am quite fluent in Eng
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
Ah, you "intrinsic value" people are so cute. So convinced that goods and services are somehow worth some abitrary values based on what they should be worth, as opposed to what people are willing to pay for them.
He said nothing about "intrinsic value". If anything he was talking about the increasing disconnect there is between the cost of producing an item and the cost to the consumer. Whether or not we have efficient, low margin, commodity markets in other words.
If chinese Rolex knockoffs are achie
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:1)
On the other hand, there's a lot of information on the internet now that allows people to be informed. I've bough
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
If indeed that's the reason, then that's fine, of course, but your analysis goes out the window if there is deception. If consumers were promised a genuine Rolex for a low price, and got a fake, then that's fraud, and it damages
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2, Insightful)
Look around the web, and you can often find out which products are the same.
Re:What the devil is value these days? (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Try searching for specs or anything on older laptops (besides auctions/where to buy batteries/memory). You end up seeing page after page of ads. Even looking for reviews... sometimes you just find ads for memory with a link to add your own review... it's driving me crazy!
Same thing with stereo components, car audio...etc.
Re:Oops (Score:3, Interesting)
Different kinds of SEOs (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Different kinds of SEOs (Score:3, Insightful)
SEO can be done ethically (Score:2)
I don't think all SEO specialists employ both ethical and unethical techniques. You've made an awfully broad generalization, and I can understand why, but I used to do a lot of SEO work, and I've come to a different conclusion.
They are trying to figure out how to cheat the system.
There's an awful lot you can do without resorting to "cheating the system," that can have a very positive long-term effect for your search engine position. The basics:
Most of the Money is in the Black Hat side (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
A more accurate measurement (Score:2, Funny)
Democracy (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Not possible (Score:1, Insightful)
You're chasing a ghost. It's not possible by definition. For instance, you can say on TV "We have a crisis in this country. Almost half - half, I say - of the population has less than average intelligence. We need to fix it. Now!"No matter what is done, this cannot be chang
Very well possible (Score:1)
Compare: More than 50% of the people have less than averege wealth (the superrich raise the average). This does not mean most of the population is poor.
Re:Not possible (Score:1)
Because of this in the long run the only thing which can make democracy work isn't 'rallying the
Re:Not possible (Score:2)
Re:Not possible (Score:2)
No, but interest in the particular subjects covered on /. probably does correlate with high intelligence. Geekdom is a subculture that disproportionately attracts intelligent people.
Unfortunately, returning to the original point, this does not necessarily mean that geeks' political opinions are worth anything. Another common characteristic of the geek is that we tend to make completely invalid assumptions abou
Re:Democracy (Score:2)
Re:Democracy (Score:2)
That is the reason why fools are allowed to vote, so they can defend their best interest, instead of trusting the choices of "smarter" people.
I rather make my own choices than allowing other people's agenda on the loop, even if that person is smarter th
Re:Democracy (Score:1)
Humans are, after all, social creatures (yes - even the Slashdotter in his mom's basement - would he be posting on Slashdot otherwise?). yes, selfish
Spin doctors and the popularity of politicians (Score:1)
In last week's article on a related story, I said (Score:4, Funny)
I suppose repeating [whatjapanthinks.com] the same tactic [whatjapanthinks.com] in a second post would move me into the unethical [whatjapanthinks.com] category?
Re:In last week's article on a related story, I sa (Score:1, Funny)
Google Insight to Article ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Google Insight to Article ... (Score:2)
covered recently (Score:1, Informative)
They also have a great search engine ranking factors list [seomoz.org]that contains a large list of the factors that influence rankings in the major SEs.
For once they get it right. A year later. (Score:1)
The Irony (Score:2, Interesting)
Does Newsweek break the Back button on purpose? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Thanks for the mention, again (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [seomoz.org]).
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.
Hmmmm (Score:2)
The nice thing: (Score:5, Funny)
**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:2)
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:2)
Re:**Beatles-Beatles pushing spyware? (Score:4, Informative)
I use Ad Muncher and it (very neatly) seperates the site's links/src's/etc for you into searchable categories.
/plug
Here's some of the sketchier SRC's that showed up
(anything like Wwxzz means AM killed the script)
http://www.softwarewings.com/cgi-bin/l
http://www.exitblaze.com/exit.js
http:
http://georeport
http://georeport.ge
ht
http://map.
I'm not going to list all the stat counters that showed up in the scripts... trust me, there's even more of them.
Oh, and * * Beatles-Bealtes, if you're reading this: you should probably remove http://www.exitblaze.com/exit.js from your site as they now redirect to hxxp://www.trafficology.com/
Don't ever say I never helped you
why is it good you use Firefox? (Score:2)
Look, I don't like sites that offer "anti-spyware" with misleading popups either, but just because you get redirected to one of those sites doesn't mean your machine is getting exploited.
And BTW, I'd recommend getting a new machine wit NX support (A64 is good). It prevents IE being exploited on this bug, it'll just crash like Firefox does on this exploit although you'll get a more informative error message than you would with Firefox (unless you had NX)
search engine optimization? (Score:1)
Of course, I was wrong.
Search engine reports (Score:1)
We shopped for an SEO (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:We shopped for an SEO (Score:2)
Re:We shopped for an SEO (Score:2, Insightful)
So basically, you lied to the sales guy to get pricing. Hopefully your customers at Custom Silicon Bracelets don't approach you on pretense to get pricing intelli
Unethical? Perhaps, but necessary!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Unethical? Perhaps, but necessary!! (Score:2)
What did your expert do, or find out, that brought this level of optimization? Anything magical? Or did they just fill out the proper headers of your pages?
Re:Unethical? Perhaps, but necessary!! (Score:2)
One thing is indeed to add a few meta tags, however google claims they wont evaluate meta tags.
The second thing is instead of making a clear and easy to read web site, we put a bit redundancy on it. So the likely search terms show up on several pages and not only the top page.
The next thing is to have mo
Like "spanglish" vs Spanish (Score:2, Insightful)
An unoptimized site is the equivalent of Spanglish [wikipedia.org]. 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/ [dmoz.org]
While, yes, I admit that the skill is in getting the site to be standards compliant
Newsweek's sad-but-true "democracy" (Score:1)
It is the present state of American politics, but it's not democracy.
And it's tragic that anyone could ever confuse the two.
Election results by Diebooooooold.
Greasemonkey - Remove ** Beatles Beatles articles (Score:2)
Here's how to optimize search engines.. (Score:2)
Re:I'm calling BS on this one (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm calling BS on this one (Score:1)
Please flout [m-w.com] rules. Do not flaunt them.
Re:I'm calling BS on this one (Score:2)
What's wrong with displaying rules ostentatiously?