111–120 of 142 posts
Nobody else read this as a joke? I read it as a joke (and a slightly racist one at that).
I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".
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If this were truly the case, we shouldn't expect quality sites to benefit from SEO. In practice, they do.
I'm not saying SEO is not effective, it certainly works, but it shouldn't, and it is Google job to make it happen. On a high level good sites don't benefit from SEO, because it wastes time and money on something that should be granted: good sites should be ranked high, crap sites should be ranked low. SEO is a cargo cult ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science ) with no benefits to society.
That robots.txt is so big that even with comments maybe google will drop it after trying to parse it for a while....
robots this size aren't that unusual http://www.bbc.co.uk/robots.txt
An SEO consultant complaining about Google's frequent algo changes is like a mechanic complaining that cars break down too often.
If I was feeling uncharitable, I would say it's a bit like a burglar complaining that the homeowner keeps installing better locks.
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There is still a case for consultants who understand how to make websites genuinely more useful and relevant. Then it's win-win. Their motives might be their rankings, traffic and profit, but if it improves the web for Google users, then that isn't necessarily a bad thing. But the tone of this "article" makes this guy sound like he wears a black hat.
I don't really. I do believe there is value in learning the dark side of this profession though. There aren't enough genuine SEOs that really understand both sides of the equation.
I'm glad Google is cleaning house b/c it became annoying trying to counsel people to not violate the Webmaster Guidelines when they could point to successful competitors or some backwater infomercial claiming they could shortcut their way by spamming.
The best strategy I've found is just to not shoot yourself in the foot in terms of site structure and IA, and invest in long-term value through link building with PR and content that naturally attracts links.
SEO has made a lot of damage to the Internet. 10 years ago links really expressed people preferences, and it was easy to get linked and ranked high when you've published useful stuff. Today, almost all large sites that people use to share links to original content use nofollow links. Because of this, it is common that when you Google for some original content, you will find links to aggregators (Stack Overflow, Reddi…
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I don't really. I do believe there is value in learning the dark side of this profession though. There aren't enough genuine SEOs that really understand both sides of the equation.
I used to agree with this, but lately I feel like any learnings are going to have a short shelf life. With the EMD updates and on-going refinements to Penguin, how long can any truly effective hack really be expected to work? I'm glad Google is cleaning house b/c it became annoying trying to counsel people to not violate the Webmaster Guidelines when they could point to successful competitors or some backwater infome…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey seems relevant.
Yes, SEO has clearly a negative notion for me. To deceive the search engine and make it less useful for me is practically the job description of SEO, in my opinion. For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you s…