Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Has SEO ruined the web?
Paul Keith:
On the contrary, word of mouth is just as unreliable.
Just ask here how many use argument mappers for example or how many people mention Compendium, Pigeonhole, Notezilla, Ubernote, Zoho, etc. etc. etc. and you're bound to get different results based on different forums.
Hardly anyone here talks about GrandView but it seems like the current hot topic in OutlinerSoftware.com right now.
Similarly, if you were merely looking up entries in Lifehacker, you might get the skewed impression that the Iphone is the ultimate app.
Go to DIYPlanner and the stuff they talk about regarding paper planners makes it seem like paper does a Superman on software productivity software in every aspect.
It's not a sure-fire advice but you might want to consider creating a Twitter account and linking it to your website if beating SEO is that important.
I know it seems like the cliche blogosphere advice/recent social media fad to give but I'm saying it less because it's the "in" thing but more because IMO SEO is being supplemented by Twitter results more and more these days and if your content is really up there, you're bound to be noticed more from your Twitter results regardless if you have a good or bad search ranking.
Edit: This service was recently posted in makeuseof.com although I haven't tried it: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/topikality-–-improve-google-alerts-get-the-articles-you-want/
superboyac:
The past couple of weeks, I've been learning a lot of new things. About 99% of whatever I found on Google is trash. Google is trashed, as far as the search engine goes. you will not really find anything good without really really trying hard. I've been learning about flowcharts, business processes, etc. and everything that I found independently using Google was worthless for the most part.
Renegade:
I've been doing SEO for years, and even did blackhat SEO before it was known as blackhat. (I've not bothered doing any blackhat SEO for a very long time now.) I've had top results for keywords that are more competitive than the top porn keywords (many of which aren't really appropriate to print here :P ), so I know my stuff pretty well.
And yes. SEO in a lot of ways has ruined things. There are a huge number of sites out there that mirror (scrape) content in order to get into search engines. They are largely useless as it's generally better to get that content from the original site. e.g. There are several sites that scrape MSDN content and forums.
It creates noise that is simply daunting to get through.
SEO has done a lot of good though. It has taught people basic common sense like URLs make more sense to humans when they look like Wordpress URLs than they do with CNET URLs.
http://microsoft2apple.com/2010/05/14/about-a-new-twitter-app-and-choices/
http://download.cnet.com/ALZip/3000-2250_4-10326198.html?tag=mncol
It's easier to see if you want to visit a site when the URL tells you things about it.
Another thing about good SEO is that if you do it right, you end up following the HTML spec better and using things properly instead of hacking things together sloppily. It forces you to write properly formatted and structured hypertext documents. This in turn results in higher quality web pages both in terms of the actual content and in terms of rendering speeds. (Hacked up crap will render slower.)
So it's kind of one of those things where you take the good with the bad. e.g. Can anyone name a government that isn't corrupt? It's still highly unlikely that no government at all would be preferable. You get order and organization at the expense of hypocrisy, theft, embezzlement, graft, and "legitimized crime".
I'm sure we could come up with a lot of similar examples, and perhaps even one or two that aren't completely cynical. :P
Nevertheless, it is still very frustrating when you constantly get sidetracked by all the spam in the search results. It's virtually impossible to get relevant results for things like car parts as it's a highly profitable area for spammers.
However, keep in mind that Amazon, Buy.com, eBay, Ask.com, and a large number of other major online retailers are some of the biggest spammers out there. They are particularly bad at spamming Google ads, and Google is complicit in it as they have a decent name/reputation, and they hand money over to Google. Google will only put up with abuse from large customers. Small customers get axed. This further exacerbates the problem of spam as it forces up the price of ads (artificially) with Google even forcing up the prices purposefully to levels that are 10~50x more than the keyword is worth (except for their large spammer customers like Ask.com and eBay). So what you end up with is the only route to go is to rely on heavy SEO that is likely to result in low quality crap.
e.g. Take some keyword that can only bring in $0.25 in revenue per click. If you want to bid on it, you may very well need to bid $5.00 OR MORE per click, even if nobody at all is bidding on it. Those kinds of keywords can only be used for arbitrage by Google large (abusive) customers, like eBay. What (small) idiot would bid there? The only recourse is aggressive SEO.
The problem isn't just SEO; it is also advertising and how Google allows abuse by very large customers.
I'm not sure that there really is a solution, as the main job of a spammer is to keep ahead of the curve in order to remain profitable. And when you cut off legitimate avenues for revenue, well, spam is a good bet. The fault doesn't lie entirely with the spammers there. There are others out there that bear responsibility for creating the situation where spam = survival.
mitzevo:
I was speaking to a friend of mine. He wrote a couple of websites for the sole purpose to rank high in search engines using SEO. He wrote about online education. He knows nothing about online education, but he wrote articles about it, just to have some content. The articles contain advice. But they were written strategically using the right words and strategies to rank high in search engines. The point is, the articles are useless. This is everywhere in the internet. Software download sites, review sites, blogs,...90% of them are beyond useless, they are often nonsensical.
--- End quote ---
Nice use of your new word ;)
superboyac:
I was speaking to a friend of mine. He wrote a couple of websites for the sole purpose to rank high in search engines using SEO. He wrote about online education. He knows nothing about online education, but he wrote articles about it, just to have some content. The articles contain advice. But they were written strategically using the right words and strategies to rank high in search engines. The point is, the articles are useless. This is everywhere in the internet. Software download sites, review sites, blogs,...90% of them are beyond useless, they are often nonsensical.
--- End quote ---
Nice use of your new word ;)
-mitzevo (June 02, 2010, 09:21 PM)
--- End quote ---
HA!! Too funny. if you had asked me, I would have told you I never used the word before in my life, until the website. Nice one!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version