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Google Businesses The Internet The Almighty Buck

Climbing up the Search Ladder 246

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-to-get-ahead-in-business dept.
j_heisenberg writes "Wired carries a story on SEOs or search engine optimizers. Among some bold claims: traffic is up 6 times and sales double, once you hit the first page of results on major engines. The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."
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Climbing up the Search Ladder More

Climbing up the Search Ladder

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  • Is there any limit on how much you can optimize.. eventually, everything will be at equillibrium...

    • Re:The question is... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:29PM (#11565925) Homepage Journal
      Is there any limit on how much you can optimize.. eventually, everything will be at equillibrium...

      no. because the system that you are optimizing for will continue to change as the optimizers continue to sabotage the quality of the ranking algorithms.

      let's face it: people use google because the front page is full of links they find useful and relevant. as optimization services get better, and more and more companies looking to hock their wares pay to get on the front page, google will lose it's edge. the result will be an improved or different ranking algorithm and... the optimization cycle begins again.

      hell, it's happening right now. google has announced that they will no longer be counting links with rel=nofollow in anchor tags when calculating pange rankings.

    • You are right that mass market products will reach equilibrium. So, everyone is hoping for some little clever trick that will make them something special. Sadly, whenever you have a market condition where people feel they need to pull tricks for survival, you will create a market rife with scams.

      Anyone with a defineable, replicable trick will probably end up selling out to the mass market fearing that their competition will sell out first.

      Personally, I think the best hope against SEO tricks is for the

    • Re:The question is... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dilvie ( 713915 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:58PM (#11566232) Homepage Journal

      You think so? The truth of it is this: Most websites are not well thought out. Many websites don't even include important keywords anywhere in their page title, heading tags, or even the page content itself!

      It's so easy to blow past 90% of your competition on most keywords, it's silly. Only a small fraction of the hottest search buzz keywords are difficult to optimize for, and even in areas with heavy competition, there is a long tail that's fairly easy to grab.

      You want to optimize your site, here's the whitehat way, and it's a piece of cake:

      • Know which keywords your potential customers are using, and include them in your page titles, headings, and content -- you don't have to do any spamming, just be sure that your landing page is exactly tuned to your customer's searches.
      • Develop a site that is worth linking to! Hire a decent designer. Make sure the site works on more than one browser. Provide quality content. Offer a good value.
      • Run a blog (update it frequently), provide an RSS feed, and send out pings. [pingomatic.com] Be sure your blog is something that people will actually want to read. Obvious spam doesn't attract inbound links.
      • Make sure your site is listed in all the obvious directories, including the local listings like superpages [superpages.com] and Yahoo! Local [yahoo.com].
      • Make it easy for people to link to you. Provide a "link to us" page with (valid) sourcecode.
      • Run an AdWords campaign, and be sure to target a wide variety of keyword variations [keyword-helper.com].
      • Link to your customers, and ask them to link back to you. Happy customers are an easy way to get hundreds of great inbound links -- more than enough to put your site at the top of most search results.

      You don't have to be a blackhat or break the bank to get results.

      • Yes, but doing all of that is hard. It requires
        • web masters who know what they are doing
        • marketing people who know what they are talking about to provide copy
        • a source of real content (e.g. getting the People Who Are Doing The Real Work to write articles for the site).

        Handing stupid money to a spammer^W Search Engine Optimizer is much easier.

        Granted, given two companies, one who is doing all of the hard work, and one that is doing the stupid stuff, I know where my money will go.

  • Pyramid (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:21PM (#11565809) Homepage
    The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page

    You mean like the Pyramid Scheme?

  • SEO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chris09876 ( 643289 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:21PM (#11565811)
    Why should I truest oneupweb when they don't have the #1 position for the keywords 'search engine optimization'? :-)

    • Re:SEO (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nine-times ( 778537 )
      Funny, yes, but isn't it also insightful? It seems to me that it's only common sense, if you're looking for the best search engine optimization company, you do a search for "search engine optimization", and pick the #1 listing... Or perhaps you through in some variations and look for someone consistently on the first page, but still...

      When you search for "search engine optimization", you get about 7,950,000 results. Who'd pay money for SEO from a company that can't place over the 6 million mark when you

    • Re:SEO (Score:5, Informative)

      by Manchot ( 847225 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:44PM (#11566088)
      Ah yes, but they don't need to optimize their own page. Do the search again, and notice that OneUpWeb is the first sponsored link. And as we learned a few weeks ago, most Google users can't tell the difference [slashdot.org] between acutal results and sponsored ones.

  • Solution (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sophrosyne ( 630428 )
    Make the front page scroll to infinity- then no one can complain.
    • ^_^ Well, you can set the number of searches displayed to an upper limit of around 100. It's not infinite, but it's enough that you usually either find what you want or get tired of looking within the first page.
    • imagine the page load time you'll get :)

      1 - 6,940,000 of about 6,940,000 for linux vs windows. (15231.15 seconds)

  • Catalog (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shumacher ( 199043 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:22PM (#11565830)
    The problem now is that the internet is looking more like a catalog. Sometimes I want to learn about something beyond what those selling things want to tell me. I'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.

    • Re:Catalog (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:26PM (#11565885) Homepage
      Suggest it to google. Ask them to make available a "non commercial" front to their engine (suggestions@google.com).

      If they can make froogle, they should be able to make an anti-froogle.

      I know I'd appreciate it, sometimes I want reviews for hardware but find it difficult to get past all the merchant sites.

    • Exclude web stores (Score:5, Informative)

      by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:28PM (#11565909) Homepage Journal

      I'd like to see google be google and froogle be froogle and that be that.

      There are some keywords you can tell Google to exclude if you don't want web stores. Try adding -price or -shipping or -checkout to your query.

      • I've been using
        -"add -to -cart" -"buy -now"
        but I'll try that.

      • Re:Exclude web stores (Score:3, Insightful)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )
        What I want to know is, why does google not have an uber-customizeable "user profile" page where you can specify custom search modifiers via a pull-down menu, label them what you want, and then apply them to your searches as you go?

        THeir "advanced search" does not include anywhere near all of the actual features which google supports, and its a shame as its sometimes difficult to figure out how to do some of the stuff.
    • Too bad everything in this world ('net included) still seems focused on making money/selling things.

      A non-commercial version of Google or exclude keywords doesn't fix that either: Even when you're not buying, commercial info can still be interesting. Like upcoming tech included in new products, or learning more about things you already have.

      It's not bad that the bulk of search results are not on the first page. There is only 1 first page, and it's only so big, so it's logical that the rest is on other p

  • Sigh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DarkHand ( 608301 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:22PM (#11565831)
    This was tried during the dot com boom. It just dosen't work. Isn't this what Google was supposed to stop?
    • Yes, but they're still susceptable to googlebombing. I figure that's what these companies are doing.
    • just doesn't work?
      it works, unfortunately. there's always some lucky company which manages to do it best..

      google has been infested with linkfarms and advertising and fake-review sites(that are just generated advertising) for god knows how long.

  • SEOs Overrated? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperficialRhyme ( 731757 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:22PM (#11565833) Homepage
    Just by using XHTML compliant code and writing in our blog my fiancee and I are the #1 result in Google, Yahoo, and the new MSN search for a wide variety of topics. This includes areas we only talk about in one post or something. Perhaps the $$ and time that people spend on search engine optimization sites/links/etc would be better spent writing proper XHTML?

    Our site is http://www.caseyandanna.com [No link, please don't slashdot!]
    A few of the common search terms that we see involve: Cinara Aphids, Shrek2 pictures/etc (my typo), Aramark norovirus

    Anyway, that's our experience.

    • Re:SEOs Overrated? (Score:5, Funny)

      by eln ( 21727 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:32PM (#11565946)
      I don't know why you bothered to include the URL, I would have found it accidentally through Google eventually.
      • I would've linked the URL. Slashdot has great Page Rank. By including my URL in my sig, I managed to hit the front page of the major search engines when searching for my last name. (Previously, I had been down around 50 or so). Although, I've dropped, 'cuz my site has been down for about 2 months now. I need to find a new host.

    • Re:SEOs Overrated? (Score:3, Informative)

      by moolb ( 856148 )
      Its rather easy to get listed under those terms because not many people are listed under those phrases.
      For example, Cinara Aphids only has 625 results in Google, and Aramark norovirus has 60 results with Google.

      I think a SEO service can be a good idea if you have a product that has more competition, but in your case it wouldn't be needed.
      Anyway, thats my thoughts on your experience.

    • Re:SEOs Overrated? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Fastolfe ( 1470 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @05:12PM (#11566382)
      The company I work for did the SEO thing. The SEO vendor provided us with a few dozen static HTML files that we were to drop into our web server's document root alongside our normal content. Obscure links to these "optimized" pages would seed the search engines.

      When I went through the static HTML documents they produced, it occurred to me that they looked an awful lot like a real web site with actual content. Our web site is one of those brochure type sites: lots of expensive graphic design and layout, little actual marked up content.

      The lesson: Build a real web site following good information design principles, make it readable to search engines, and then style it to make it look like the glossy brochure you seem to want instead. Use a healthy dose of hyperlinks to product descriptions as needed to ensure the right pages get the right focus, and you're set.

      SEO appears to some executives as some magic computer voodoo designed to trick search engines into going for your content first. While that's partially accurate, the biggest impact on search engine listings is actually having useful content. Enough with the flashy text-in-graphics web sites and start writing pages with text-in-markup, and the search engines will notice.
    • Your search phrases only have As for XHTMl, it doesn't make a difference. Page level optimization counts so little on google. Which is why when you search for miserable failure, it list pages that don't even have the search term in the content. For high value terms like Mesothelioma($160 per click last time I checked on overture), none of the top results are xhtml compliant. For a term worth $250k+ a month on overture, there is lot people vying for the top spot. If xhtml made a big difference you'd see it
    • I like how you have a link in your sig directly beneath the "no link" URL.

  • Similar (Score:5, Interesting)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:23PM (#11565839) Journal
    I run a music site [clinko.com] (Yeah, i know, shameless link...) that is constantly being beaten out by 3 domains. I did a whois on the owners and they're all the same guy in india.

    I heard that this is why Google signed up for domain selling. They're getting their hands on the whois information to cross reference.
    That would get rid of a lot of falce pagerank building...

  • Ironic (Score:2, Funny)

    by octothorpe99 ( 34654 )
    Wouldn't it be ironic for a Search Engine Optimization company to be on the 2nd, 3rd, or worse, even below, in Google's list? :-P

  • Aren't SEO unethical (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Grey Clone ( 770110 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:23PM (#11565851) Homepage
    Am I the only one who considers SEO unethical, almost to the sense of Nvidia or ATI making drivers that would cheat on benchmark programs? If your page is what someone wants, good, if it isn't, you can pay Google and they'll advirtise it on the side of the page along with all the other junk.
    • There are two levels of SEO work - one is just making your site better for a search engine to read - make it nice and compliant, that sort of thing. I'd count that as being OK and a good thing for the web overall.

      The other way is to try and deliberately skew the results through link farms or jamming up blogs with your domain name.

      I've met people promising people the world concerning where they'll be on Google's page, and all I can think is "and what happens when the algorithm changes?".

    • Well, not only that, the SEOs (such as Adminshop, a known blog/link/referral spammer) have no qualms about linkdumping or incestuous link-farm sites, which don't really do anything but improve a PageRank. It's incredibly underhanded, but they do it.

      Some of these SEO companies also do browser hijacking and popups, or they run PPC search engines. The entire CoolWebSearch series of hijackers comes to mind at this.
    • Since when is business ethical?

  • SEO is essentially stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitalgimpus ( 468277 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:24PM (#11565853) Homepage
    Why is it stupid? Well lets look at it:

    1. What keeps people on your site? Optimization? Or quality content? What got/keeps people at slashdot? Content or optimization?

    2. Search engines catch on, and adjust so nobody super inflates.

    3. It's not a business strategy! You ultimately need to have something more.

    4. SPAM. How do you think search engine optimization promises super high rankings? They use their bots to spam blogs, forums, guest books, etc. To inflate google based on page rank. Effective? Yea, even with the new rel="nofollow", but it's not good. And could get you blackisted as a spammer as many domains are finding.
    • What got/keeps people at slashdot? Content or optimization?

      The correctly-spelled original content that never appears more than once.
      • The funny quotes, and all these people pretending to know what their talking about.

        Since most "news" is reposts, and others have links in the article that are irrelivant, I see no quality in the content.
    • I agree, its getting frustrating using google for anything but finding places that have a product you want to buy. Heck, I get places like Amazon multiple times on the first page anytime someone might have written a book on the subject I am looking for.

      When I am searching for something, I glance at each page that looks promising, and if its not what I want, back to the results I go. Unfortunately, this is what I seem to be doing most of the time when searching through Google.
    • Location! Location! Location!

      Specifically, you need people to have heard of you. Remember that many of the companies who employ these SEOs are selling products which would normally be sold through spam emails. They're not depending on some intelligent person to buy their products. They want the 8-year-old grandmother who every year pays those nice boys to apply sealant to her roof and always gets the special anti-rust coating for her car. They want the kind of guy who would actually click on a penile enla

    • What keeps people on your site? Optimization? Or quality content?

      Duh, obviously optimizing your page rank doesn't "keep people on your site". The point is that if I decide to buy, say, wire coat hangers [google.com], I'm not going to slog through 20 Google pages and follow all the relevant sites for six months to see who has the most compelling coat hanger-related blog. I'm going to compare the top three hits and buy from -- err, it looks like there's still room for a bit of optimization in the coat hanger world.

    • I've always heard the theory, that if at all possibly, you should try and name your company with so it starts with an "A". As it more likely that a customer just looking in the "Yellow Pages" will call you. My mother worked at "Assist Business Service" for a long time. Listed as "ABS" in the phone book. A lot of times, the reason they got picked was "Well, you were the first one in the phone book".

      While you still have to be able to deliver after customers contact you, reducing the cost of aquiring cus

  • So that is what the idiots who are constantly spamming by blog call themselves?
    • Yes [theregister.co.uk] - "So the link spammers - who prefer to call themselves "search engine optimisers", but get upset when search engines do optimise themselves - turned to other free outlets which Google already regarded highly, because their content changes so often: blogs."

  • Good value? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:25PM (#11565863) Homepage Journal
    "I'm willing to pay to attract a more qualified customer," Kosciewicz said. "It costs me 15 cents in advertising for every buck I get back in sales. That's a great margin in any business."

    Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.

    • Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.

      Depends on how you count what a margin is. If you mean 15% above what the product cost, that can be a lot until you take out electricity, rent, paychecks and so on. Broadcast (TV) components have high margins like that (actually, a lot more), but much lower profit since you maybe sell 500 of an item, then there is maintenance and other stuff.

      If, however, you mean 15% after all costs
    • Really? Doesn't that assume that you have at least 15% of margin to play with? A lot of business would kill for that much.

      That's not much of an assumption. Margins in retail businesses are almost never anywhere near that low, unless it's on specific loss-leader items designed to increase traffic, or unless the item is a highly-competitive big-ticket item; say, loose diamonds or new cars. (The former because it's a commodity being sold and distributed by a rabid cottage industry, the latter because consume

  • What I wanna know is... (Score:3, Funny)

    by hanshotfirst ( 851936 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:25PM (#11565864)
    ...how much does business increase or decrease when the moderators post an ad^H^Harticle on slashdot?

  • They do work (Score:3, Informative)

    by BigDogCH ( 760290 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:27PM (#11565895) Journal
    My friend was once marketed by a company who was trying to sell car security systems. What they wanted to sell him was a website where he could market these systems himself. They claimed that all he had to do was purchase a premade website, for $12,000. After selling 15 systems, it would pay for itself. If the website didn't pay for itself, he would get his money back.
    Anyway, as soon as he purchased, he noticed that his page was showing up on page 50+ on google. So, he wanted to fix this. He payed big bucks to a Search Engine Optomization company. In return, within a few months the company had him moved up to the 2nd page.
    Did it work, yes! Was it worth it, no. Everything they had him do, I suggested to him (I found lists of techniques online). By the way, he got his $12,000 back (sounded like a scam to me, but I guess not).
    • Question - how does your buddy know that the SEO was responsible for the higher ranking? Seems to me the site could have moved up in the rankings on its own once Google did a more thorough analysis of the site content, changes to the sites content, mention of the URL elsewhere, etc. All things you don't necessarially need an SEO to do for you.

      • Re:They do work (Score:2, Informative)

        by BigDogCH ( 760290 )
        Excellent point, and I don't know. I do know that they had me alter some of the html on his site. Meta-tags mostly, which I hadn't heard of until then. For those of you who haven't (I can't be the only one), they are quite simple. [google.com] I also know that there were hundreds of sites created by this company to sell their own product. Not a bad idea though! Build a product, then make money selling sites which sell your product, but you don't have to maintain the sites or do any marketing at that point. Let ev

    • Where can I sign up to sell these car security systems? If the car security systems are so profitable, why doesn't the partent company sell them itself? :)

  • SEO = Grrr (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Arbin ( 570266 ) *

    Search Engine Optmization just rings of illicit behaviour that is closely related to spamming. I'm aware there are "honest" individuals who insure that the page is well formed, uses proper heading/title tags, but what of those blackhat individuals who stop at nothing to boost pagerank and call themselves SEO's?

    Take for instance Referral spamming of weblogs. Certain bloggers would publish their recent referrers lists and these spammers caught on and well, I now receive several hundred fake referrers from v

    • I don't think search engine optimization is any different from any other kinds of marketing. You have anything from honest marketing, to really sleezy marketing techniques. Some ads leads to products that lives up to the promise, most ads leads to products that are totally bogus.

      The issue today is that you can have a great site that no one will notice unless you at least make some rudimentary attempts to market it i.e. make it known to other people.

      My own pet peeve is that I'm tired of searching for infor

  • How shocking ! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ultranova ( 717540 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:29PM (#11565919)

    A study conducted by a CEO of a SEO company shows that using a SEO company can create a thriving online business, and not using one can mean banckrupty.

    In other news: Mafia concludes that not paying them protection money can be hazardous to your health ! Stay tuned for more headlines from the cutting edge of research !

  • Take Search Technologies in a Different Direction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CoccaNut ( 855912 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:29PM (#11565921)
    Since the dawn of the web, workarounds and cheat have continually been found to "optimize" search results. The sad result of every web site's quest to appear at the top of search results is that it has prevented search engines from providing "objectively relavent" results.

    While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page the way a human does and connect it with the requested search terms. Something similar to the Cyc [cyc.com] project that Doug Lenat has been working on since the 80's (and its subsequent OpenCyc [opencyc.org] F/OSS derivative, only tied into search engines. And, no, I am not talking about Ask Jeeves or other silliness like that. ; )

    Otherwise, "relevance" is just going to become a euphamism for "the people with the most money to 'optimize' their results"
    • This is a great idea. Actually, companies like Google and MS and Yahoo could hire the legions of unemployed dot-commers who keep refusing to get a new job/career and let them do it. Sure, every search would take a minute or so, but the results would be great, and all of the dot-commers could go back to the cube life they so enjoyed.

  • Google (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Moby Cock ( 771358 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:29PM (#11565923) Homepage
    I though that Google's algoritms were designed to prevent this type of crap. I know Google isn't the only search engine, but I believe it is the most used (isn't it?). Thus, these SEOs ought to have limited effect of ranking, should they not.

    That part of the TFA about Eastwood seems a little weak to me. They said they refurbished their website and then began to get more sales. They attribute tht to search engines. Could it not also be because the new design was more conducive to customers needs and thereby increasing sales?

    • They Honestly Try (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EXTomar ( 78739 )
      The basic problem is the classic "Human-Machine Interface". Machines can't tell the difference from a page exploiting the scoring rules from one that is an honest web page playing by normal rules.

      Google does honestly try to avoid this crap. The problem is in the end even with the cleverest scoring algorithm is still an algorithm. Knowing what Google programatically emphizes shows how to build web pages to take advantage of their rating which isn't necessarily a good web page or any more meaningful than

  • Cue the Game Theory (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page."

    Which is called the prisoner's dilemma. If no one uses these SEO's everyone is relatively happy, someone uses it to their benefit / detriment of others (as they go down the list). Everyone then starts wasting time / money using them and we are at a nasty outcome.
  • (some stupid post here)

    --
    Get a Free Front Page Search Engine Ranking! [freesearchresults.com] Just complete one offer and get 500 of your friends to complete an offer!

  • First Page is nothing... (Score:4, Funny)

    by supermonkeyball ( 816471 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:32PM (#11565953)
    "Slashdot carries a story on First Posts posting. Among some bold claims: Moderation is up 1000000 times and karma plumets, once you hit the submit button. The catch: eventually everyone will try to do a FP, and there is only one first post."

  • Google saves HTML? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ewieling ( 90662 ) <user@noSpAM.devnull.net> on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:36PM (#11566001)
    Maybe Google could reduce the page rankings of pages with bad/incorrect/non-standard HTML?

  • It's a growing business (Score:4, Informative)

    by saddino ( 183491 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:44PM (#11566094)
    In most trades, when someone comments on SEO, it's almost always a quote from one of the founders of SearchEngineWatch [searchenginewatch.com], a subscription only forum and web site focused on "Search Engine Marketing." Reasearching the site, it really is amazing how many people and companies are involved in "optimization." This field is getting huge, and as the article says, just about every major business is doing it. FYI, most of the strategies involved aren't fraud (like farm linking) but rather how certain keywords and meta tags result in different search engine rankings.

  • It's just like SAT prep testing... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gadgetfreak ( 97865 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:49PM (#11566140)
    It makes you good at getting a higher score on the SATs, not actually improving your abilities.
    Similarly, if your web site is aimed at getting a better page ranking, you'll get more attention even though you're not actually better.

    It's a way to defeat - or at least get a leg up in the system. Unfortunately it means that everyone will have to do it in order to keep up, and eventually search engines will yeild the results of a popularity contest, not which web pages are most relevant. Especially when they're trying to sell something.

    Come to think of it, this sounds just like politics as well...

  • (Haiku form)

    There is only one
    page which gets found as the first
    On the search engine.

    However I ask:
    How many search terms can be
    As typed by users?

    S-E-O's should do:
    Think more about their users
    And target their pages

    Rather than just cheat
    (does the first one always win?)
    On the stupid google race.

    Get to work, you dumbs
    free market will always have
    many companies.

    I would like to thank
    The DeCSS Haiku
    for inspiring me.

    Yes, I'm a stupid
    for posting this in haiku
    (well, it's my first try)

    Don't mod this funny
    But ins

  • Thinking Outside the Box (Score:3, Funny)

    by Royster ( 16042 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @04:57PM (#11566219) Homepage
    The catch: eventually everyone will use SEOs, and there is only one first page.

    Obviously, what we need are bigger first pages.

  • There are a few companies I deal with online and they do NOT come up on the first page.

    my requirements are service, price, and quality. I'm a price whore that will pay more for decent service, quality I do not care about because I make informed decisions.. I.E. i'm after a specific make and model.

    More and more people are doing this, becoming a more-savvy shopper and not doing the ADHD behaivoir of "ooh shiney first link!", and those people can not stand waiting 3-7 days to get something so they buy from
  • I dunno. When I'm actually looking for a product or service, I usually end up skipping everything on the first page altogether, because there are so many worthless purveyors of useless crap clamoring to get to the top of the search.

    I lack any insight into these matters, because I ceaselessly underestimate the stupidity and sheepishness of my fellow consumers, however.
  • The fact is 'Search Engine Optimization' through link-farms or what have you is an extremely easy practice to put an end to.

    If Yahoo! or Google really cared about abuse they would spot-check for abusive practices. Abusers would be penalized by having their listings completely removed for 6 months to a year, or fixed to a deep ranking-level for a period of time.

    Furthermore, Yahoo! or Google could crossreference all sites appearing on linkfarms and reduce page rankings for all of them.

    The reality is that

  • Google's official statement (Score:5, Informative)

    by jdavidb ( 449077 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @05:18PM (#11566468) Homepage Journal

    Google's official statement on search engine optimization [google.com] gives a number of reasons to be wary of search engine optimizers. While not condemning them outright, they have almost nothing positive to say.

    I would think anyone paying money to "guarantee a higher rank on Google" would want to first see what Google itself says about the subject.

    • Actually when one RTFAs, one finds that Google actually has this to say:

      Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. However, there are a few unethical SEOs who have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.

      Sounds like they're saying some rather positive thing

  • Here's a novel idea (Score:3, Interesting)

    by renderhead ( 206057 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @05:22PM (#11566504)
    How about people stop making sites that are so similar to existing sites that they are unnecessary? Before you launch your internet business, maybe you should try this.

    1.) Go to Google and type in the search terms you would use to find a site like the one you're proposing.
    2.) If you get more than a page of sites offering the exact same thing, find another idea because you're fighting an uphill battle.

    I understand that there are some fields where there will be similarity. Geico, Progressive, and State Farm would all like to be at the top of the "auto insurance" search. But if you want to open an online bookstore, you'd darn well better have something to set you apart from the million other online booksellers (especially Amazon) or you're dead meat no matter what your Google ranking is. Find out what that one thing is, and specialize in it. Be the best online seller of 18th century railroad books [google.com] or two-headed troll dolls [google.com]. If you can't rise to the top in a highly specialized area, you deserve your obscurity.

    • Re:Here's a novel idea (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Kirth ( 183 )
      18th century railroad-books? There's the problem. What do you get on the second link? this [discounttrainsonline.com]. I'd be actually quite happy with Ospreys "18th century highlanders" (I actually do have that book), but what the hell? I was searching for railroad books, not for a shitload of Ospreys military history. What kind of a dumb site is this, and what kind of a stupid ranking does that?

      And to make matters worse: Maybe I was searching for 18th century books about railroads, and not for books about 18th century railroads (

  • Google Is Broken / Censoring (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xcomm ( 638448 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @05:34PM (#11566645)
    I'm considering Google as a broken search engine.

    SandBox [webmasterworld.com], overating links - link farm impact, hilltop oligarchy, big sites oligarchy, 2x32 double index as not able to go on 64Bit therefore sites dumped in secondary index, 301 redirects not working, 302 page hijacking...

    There are a lot of faults they have to be blamed for doing nothing to solve it out.

    But the sandbox massacre is a real crime they are responsible for to the Web community:

    They dump about a year now 90 % of the new opened domains into a secondary index (mainly its assumed tha G$$gle is be not able to go over the 32 Bit barrier for siteids as all money is pumped in opening new shops and not in the core bussines SE) and thus never pop up in top SERPs. But as well a lot of this sites would in Googles normal algo if not Google would filter them out.

    They block 1 year of 10 Internet year - what a crime!

    Try this to see unfiltered results:

    keyword keyword -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf -asdf

    Or see all the great new domains filtered out for your keywords here. [scroogle.org]

    • Alright man, I don't want to be mean, but I got greater undestanding of your post from the replies than from the post itself. This leads to two suggestions:

      • Post in your native language. It is clear it isn't English. Provide an English translation too, but allow people to seek out there own. Yours isn't comprehensible to me.
      • Perhaps your problem is you honestly don't understand what Google is doing. Seriously, this could be a communication issue. You might dislike what you think they are doing with

  • Focus on content (Score:2, Insightful)

    by John Bokma ( 834313 )
    Since that is what Google et are focussing on, or trying to. Don't go for the SEO trick of the day, since it will mean your site will drop when something changes. My experience is: write content. Watching the SERPs, tweaking your pages constantly, and checking your PR is a waste of time if you do it all the time. Add pages, and focus on the content. If your visitors like your pages, you get more links, and in the end that works better than the hack of the week. I am able to get 300+ visitors/day every mon
  • I actually write SEO content -- but in a specialized manner. All of my content has to be keyword specific -AND- useful. Its the only way to get onto the search engines, and realistically stay there.

    My works never involved link farming, or similar sort, and in the end results in better company pages (and ranks).

    However, my competition doesn't see things in that way: They put bullcrap up for the search engines, which results in more bullcrap jobs for SEO.

    (And by SEO, I mean standard content for websites. S
  • I think it'd be a lot easier if google just blacklisted everyone who was ever caught doing bad SEO (link farming, blog spamming, misleading keywords, and the like) by name, domain, company, etc., and refused to ever show any link to any page they were affiliated with. As a private company, they can take whatever retribution they want, especially considering that many SEO practices are designed specifically to lower the relevance of Google's search results by promoting inferior links.
  • Search returns with almost equal weights should be shuffled.. so the top few sites do not appear in order, unless one site has overwhelming weight over the others.. like searching for "CNN". Even the lower-weight items should be randomized, with a lower probability for them to rise, such that the 100th item will in 0.001% or less of the returns appear as item # 1. The domain name should be given a great deal of weight.

    Apart from these, we can just let the commercial entities pay for their rating, so the hi

  • All good website should do SEO. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeFM ( 12491 ) on Thursday February 03, 2005 @09:44PM (#11568751) Homepage Journal
    All good websites need to use proper search engine optimization to let search engines and users find them. There are two types of SEO: those which are valid and important parts of site design and those which are tactics designed to trick search engines. I always help my clients with the first while reminding them that trying to trick the search engines is a good way to get themselves blacklisted.

    A lot of websites don't even say what they do. How is a user expected to find your website if it doesn't say what it does? Clearly state the purpose of your website and the purpose of every page so that users and search engines will know what to expect. How many websites don't even have titles or have poor titles on most of the pages? A lot.

    Websites tend to use images or Flash where text would serve them better. Stating what you do in an image or Flash does nothing to help search engines find you. Often these sites contain so many images and fancy animations that users have trouble navigating them. Websites should remember the golden rule of user-interface design: keep it simple stupid. Text should be text and not an image or Flash. If you must use an image or Flash then you should use the proper alt and title tags and you should repeat the same text as text in your page.

    Many websites don't tell anybody they exist. They post something great but nobody ever finds it because they don't create incoming links for themselves. When you make a website, or a major new page to your website, then tell people about it. Tell people on archived mailing lists you use, list it with directories such as dmoz, etc. I personally encourage my clients to create community sites around their product and to sponsor paid-links (not ad banners) on informational websites related to their product.

    Most of the steps involved are completely legitimate things you should be doing for your website anyway. The best way to rise to the top is to provide good content and to act like a website is expected to act.

    A lot of howto websites have problems in SEO. They post useful information telling us how to do useful things but because they haven't considered their users actually finding their site they tend to be hard to find. That's why when you search for something you tend to find the first couple pages filled with unrelated spam and links to forums and mailing list articles. I had this problem myself for a long time. It's only been in the past year that I've began making an effort to get my howto's to rank well when people search for information on those topics.

    Tricking search engines is negative SEO. It may work for a while but when the search engines catch on it can seriously hurt your placement. You shouldn't need to do these things either. Some things such as creating links to and from your website are perfectly valid but are often abused by people who have the misimpression that spamming out thousands of links is going to help them. For a while it might but usually not for very long.

    Strategic partnerships with appropiate cross-linking is the way to go. Think of the way Slashdot links to Newsforge, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc and they link back. THAT is the right way to do it. It's also not a bad idea to create rss feeds of your website that others can include into their own websites. THAT's a good way to get a lot of links back to your site.

    Hopefully as awareness grows more websites will be properly optimized. Doing so will certainly make life easier for users Googling for what they want to know.

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