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Sick of SEO Scumbags

thehodge.co.uk

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Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#41

Post by OGinparadise »

abeatnik wrote: post #36
cbeach wrote: post #23

There's only one search engine that anyone cares about. Companies live or die by their inclusion in that index. SEO is a nasty little cottage industry that benefits from the algorithmic monoculture in search. On a somewhat related note, there is only one display advertising program that anyone cares about. If you get banned from Adsense because a competitor hammered an ad on your site, say - you're out. Forever. With…

"It seems a lot of Android fanboys and "Google Openness believers" are sleepwalking us all into the next dark "Microsoft" chapter." If anyone is "sleepwalking" anyone anywhere then I think it's the people making big money from companies like Google, not consumers or openness advocates. That is, people like you before you found yourself unceremoniously kicked out of the club.

They will wake up one day, like website owners did the minute Google decided to "compete" with them. It's not really a competition, Google controls all aspects of search and decides how much and what type of traffic to send to ads, to their advertisers, to it's own sections and to poor Jane's Delicious Pies that can't afford the $2.50 a click.

Judging by the increasing earnings Google is clearly winning, so to all the lurking Google engineers, a hearty congrats! You beat them fair and square, just as IE beat all other browsers when Microsoft decided that it was the best and made it the default one.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#42

Post by jiggy2011 »

camus wrote: post #25
the1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh? what about baidu?

you have a point , sorry i'm a bit western-centric. There is also yandex , yet it doesnt really make sense for non chinese or non russian centered businesses to invest in Yandex or Baidu ranking. I live in europe , few have heard of Bing for instance, so Yandex , or Baidu ... it is like Alpha Centauri to them ...

Unless you have a business that targets people all over the world. Like a software business.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#43

Post by csomar »

cbeach wrote: post #23

There's only one search engine that anyone cares about. Companies live or die by their inclusion in that index. SEO is a nasty little cottage industry that benefits from the algorithmic monoculture in search. On a somewhat related note, there is only one display advertising program that anyone cares about. If you get banned from Adsense because a competitor hammered an ad on your site, say - you're out. Forever. With…

There's only one search engine that anyone cares about.

That's not my new experience. I have found that Bing (and Yahoo, partially) ranks sites differently than Google. Google is quite competitive and thus it's hard to rank.

I tried ranking in Google, but even the second page doesn't help. I optimized for Bing and now it brings much more than Google. Certainly, my SE traffic is quite low (few hundreds a month) but I found Bing traffic to be decent and convert well.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#44

Post by hipsters_unite »

netrus wrote: post #30
Nursie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not anti SEO because it's unregulated or unstable. I'm anti-SEO because it seeks to subvert the search engine's mission (return the most useful results for the searcher* ) to something more akin to advertising (return the results that the person paying for SEO wants). It pollutes and subverts the web experience for everyone. It's not the practices that are the problem, it's the whole idea. [*]OK so I acknowledge…

Many SEO techniques are in line with the user's best interest. Sitemaps, Keywords, accessibility (clean source code) etc. help Google to understand the content of your page better. That's the reason why people like Matt Cutts exist. Of course, much of SEO IS dirty, and I am not sure if there is serious movement of "ethical SEO".

'SEO' as it is sold to clients by SEO companies is packaged as another form of advertising, nothing more. It's an industry that thrives on subverting the discourse on search keywords to sell stuff.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#45

Post by martinced »

The double-talk on HN never ceases to amaze me.

On one day Google is close to dying and there are lots of alternatives out there and on the next day the very same people are writing that "SEO = Google pagerank ownage" as if Google was the one and only search engine which mattered.

So which is it? Are Google's days numbered or not?

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#46

Post by edraferi »

I like the point about smaller firms' vulnerability to this kind of thing. I think it speaks to the whole "code literacy" issue. An educated consumer solves cures many ills.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#47

Post by csomar »

Since people started criticizing Google :) I'd like to point out something really quite annoying (and also a little Evil) that Google is doing: They are hiding the search terms in your Google Analytics report.

Google pretended that it's going to affect a single digit of your search terms (check the blog post), but for me, it's from 70% to 90% on my sites (around 8 sites, same issue).

This is really the worst move that I have seen so far from the Search giant.

Here is a good blog post explaining the issue: http://www.infront.com/blogs/the-infront-blog/2012/12/14/key...

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#48

Post by Encosia »

camus wrote: post #9

Why are we using the expression SEO since there is only one search engine people are targetting/using ? do businesses really care if they are numero uno on Bing or duckduckgo ? I never understood that. Let's cut the crap , SEO is Google rank optimization. It means there is no SEO since the only player that decides how SEO works is google. If tomorrow Google decides using the word "FLOWER" in your header improves your…

That's probably true for most of us here, but definitely not for every demographic. My personal blog that focuses on software development gets almost all of its search traffic from Google, as you'd expect. However, you might be surprised that a consumer focused site I run only gets 55% of its search traffic from Google (and this site gets more total search traffic than my blog, which does pretty well itself).

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#49

Post by dendory »

Honestly there's so many different scams online that people taking shortcuts in the SEO world is fairly minor. The problem is that Google searches are so crucial to so many people. Back before they were around, if you wanted to start a business you needed startup cash for marketing, ads, etc. You needed to become a well known brand. Now everyone and their dog are told they can start an online business, pay $100 for an SEO package and call it a day. But just like developers basing their code on Facebook, shops basing their traffic on Google rankings are always at risk.

Re: Sick of SEO Scumbags

#50

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

From the article:

  If your telling the client your doing high quality link 
  building, then buying the cheapest package you can from a
  link seller, that’s fraud and in todays world, you can 
  cause serious damage.
The mom and pop store that got hit... It is a shame. But: This mom and pop store certainly has their own responsibility. Especially if they rely on Google to keep their business afloat. They are webmasters, and as such should take note of the webmaster guidelines [1]. If they want to outsource being a webmaster, the webmaster they hire should do the SEO hiring and guideline compliance. Having an online business is more than just putting up a website.

The webmaster guidelines are fairly clear on these matters:

  Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in 
  Google search results may be considered part of a link 
  scheme.

  Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any 
  companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know
  exactly how they intend to "help" you.
Yes, to me, this means every "high quality" link building program is suspect from the very start. Getting a high quality backlink from CNN or from 100 low-quality blog sites doesn't change the manipulative nature of these (bought) links. This makes the difference between low-quality and high-quality link building moot.

(Google) search is not a black box most make it out to be. SEO is not magic. Make a site accessible and search bots have no problem crawling and indexing your site. Create quality content. Read the webmaster guidelines. Google wants your content to rank on its own merits. Align yourself: simply stop buying link schemes, start writing quality content, and EARN those links. Optimize websites for users (of which searchbots are just a subset). Try inbound marketing and website optimization.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38...

P.S. I am sick of SEO scumbags too. I am also sick of the blind SEO hate on a start-up site (start-ups often need SEO, yet a lot lack it). Didn't patio11 used to give actionable, and much appreciated advice on these matters? Do we really want to eat the sour grapes from someone banned by Adwords or Google ("Because Google targetted them, because their competitor set them up, because they got hit by those bloody quality updates, because they are not social enough, because they don't buy Adwords, because they don't use blackhat SEO, $insert_other_excuse_for_why_Google_is_required_to_rank_them").

P.P.S: The good SEO's I know often have their own sites they work on, or join an agency to work on big traffic sites. They are not using a cold-call phone team to get their clients, or stay busy optimizing mom and pop stores. This may skew the experiences you have with SEO's in general.

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