21–26 of 26 posts
> URL's are now sentences. Which is still better than http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQI... (add 100+ chars) type of URLs we used to have before the SEO era. Most SEO is nothing more than basic web concepts implemented right. People benefits from that, too.
It seems like something of a zero sum game to me, since they're competing for rankings, rather than, IMO, creating much actual value. Once you've taken care of the basics that Google mentions on their site, more effort is just an "arms race" in some ways.
Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".
Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.
Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks who had sites black listed by them.
If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.
I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do search engines actually try to "de duplicate" such content? Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged? What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or is this another "tragedy of the common"? In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?
To questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes. The only real way for most people to fight back is to report them to google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1
I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.
This is a really old conversation and it has steadily become less and less relevant over the past 5 years. The most effective SEO practices these days involve off-page and off site linking and on-page optimization is gets slightly less and less effective every year. Tricks like keyword stuffing URLs, title attributing everything, and no-follow sculpting, which used to actually make a difference at one point in time,…
White-hat SEO, or providing genuinely good content that's easy for both humans and algorithms to parse, complete site maps, etc. is unquestionably good. Gray- or black-hat SEO, which results in ad-spammed content farms reaching the top results when there are much better sources (in many cases sources which were scraped by the SEO sites without proper credit) is destroying the web. SEO agencies posting dozens of gener…
Good SEO is good for the Web, bad SEO is bad for the Web.