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Has SEO ruined the web?
superboyac:
The answer to the thread title is yes, a good example to illustrate it is something I was doing just yesterday.
I was searching for an online stream of a soccer game not available on TV (putting aside the illegalities of streaming) google search results gave me pages and pages of "team x vs team y June 2 2010". I will let you all guess how many of those pages actually had the stream for the game.
-rgdot (June 03, 2010, 03:49 PM)
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That's precisely what I'm talking about. You can do the same for just about anything. Unless you already kind of sort of know where you're trying to go, good luck.
Renegade:
Okay, so noting this mine field, what advice would be offered to one trying to get a website positioned correctly for the topic its content is relevant to?
(Bear with me, I know this is only vaguely on topic)
I ask because I'm currently in the process of redoing the company website which we've never really tried drawing attention to...because it's hidious. The new site which will (hopefully be non-hidious) feature online shopping while showcasing the company (yada yada yada) will need to be created with the SEO madness in mind.
So... any advice on what I should/should not do/be doing?
-Stoic Joker (June 03, 2010, 07:37 AM)
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Too broad of a request. Check out the SEO Book blog and just write properly using the right tags. Get off-site links in -- that's crucial.
Paul Keith:
Google is just one more sad example of how there has never been a system so respected, useful, or worthwhile that somebody didn't eventually show up and start gaming it for their own advantage.
It's even sadder when the people who created the system start doing it themselves.
And many do. :-\
-40hz (June 03, 2010, 10:28 AM)
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That begs the question though. Was Google ever so respected, useful and worthwhile?
In the limited space of a fad or a well-reviewed item sure but does it hold up to a classic?
If anything Google merely superseded Yahoo and that sets the precedent for everything else.
I think Wikipedia did a better job of uprooting the mystique of Britannica despite having a shorter life span and even today it isn't as expected to be the better model but rather merely an alternative model.
Google though was merely a search engine. If it started to filter out search engines in the beginning, it would have not penetrated through and beat out Yahoo.
I think there is more evidence that humanity has never been so united that it was ever able to counter the social problems brought by technology compared to the technical problems.
For every one out there that works on Antivirus companies, you're most likely going to stumble upon spam methods from either an acquaintance or from being exposed long enough on the internet on your own.
In this same sense, for every customizeable blacklist and whitelist feature of a browser or instituted by a government, there is rarely the unity that benefits individual preferences over technological pragmatism.
What I mean by this is that from a non-techie perspective, if someone doesn't go out there and actually change or create something, the knowledgeable users of the internet who already possess the knowledge to bypass many of those annoyances won't go out of their way to make it easier for everyone else.
Yes, they will create malware blocklists and parental controls but they won't attempt to try and create a "You're better off with these site than these Google first page search results" site for people other than themselves but on the other side of the issue, it's because there's no truly solid culturally bound society that also thinks "this is such a bad problem that we all need to unite to help these blacklists/whitelists makers to better understand what sites we deem should be blocked."
Even worse so, IF there is a community that's been set up, it often becomes overtaken by censorship philosophy rather than for the name of progress. That is, to use guns and drugs as an analogy, it's much more tempting and effective to divide the issue between pro-gun/drug and anti-gun/drug rather than pro-education and anti-education of said things.
Such separation therefore allows for gaming to prosper not because human nature exist but because human unity does not find it as dedicated to producing a counter-gaming mentality. On a smaller more pop culture scale, it would be like crying that 3d gaming ruined the demand for 2d gaming but not saving 2d gaming by going beyond a mere social network for 2d gamers or actually providing superior 2d games that edge out 3d games.
It's also in human nature to provide better alternatives and to continue going against the flow. After all, that is how Google started in the first place. The dilemma though is that it's rude maybe ignorant or idealistic to mention this stuff because we for the most part don't want to hear the concept of "If you have a better idea, pursue it".
...or it's much more realistic to say, the more talented and knowledgeable people do pursue it but they pursue it to rid themselves of the problem. They pursue the problem by becoming a better or equally competent gamer of search results rather than collaborate their knowledge on upgrading the current model thus leaving it back to the same model of "waiting until a competitor of Google manages to develop something radical enough that it will beat out Google and repeat what Google did to Yahoo in a more modern context."
Paul Keith:
I apologize if the above was just a repeat of what I said (I didn't recheck), it's just that I'm currently reading this article and it made me want to post something like that to your (40hz's) post:
The case of South Korea also illustrates another peculiarity of successful modernity. When the Communists grabbed control of North Korea, this looked like a case of historical bad luck. Korean families were divided and the North was turned into a withdrawn and menacing state that enslaved its citizens. Yet, as Machiavelli observed, virtue is what you make of your fortune – whether that fortune happens to be good or bad.13 What makes a society virtuous in Machiavelli’s sense – able to master fortune and ride its ups and downs – is strong culture. Sometimes strong culture expresses itself through the medium of art, sometimes through philosophy, and sometimes through religion. It was Hegel who observed the crucial stimulating role that art, religion and philosophy play in highly dynamic societies.
What allowed South Korea to capitalize (literally) on its (bad) fortune? Calvinism imported from America played a part; so did Christianity more generally. Korean Christians took a leading role in the resistance to the Japanese Occupation, and became a major social force after World War II.14 Around 20 per cent of South Koreans are Protestants and ten per cent are Catholic. There is a clear relationship between the extraordinarily rapid spread of Christianity in Korea after 1945 and the emergence of a highly energetic Korean modernity. What is being suggested here is not that the Protestant ethic equals capitalism, but rather that great and dynamic societies have an enigmatic culture core.15 Protestantism in South Korea in part provides this because of the Protestant metaphysic in which individual conscience and free will are combined with a powerful sense of predestination and necessity.
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Paul Keith:
Not sure if this is any more enlightening but IMO this seems like the simplest standard implement of SEO right now:
http://www.lancescoular.com/smTPo4.html
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