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The Destruction of the Web

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: The Destruction of the Web

#71

Post by DanielBMarkham »

nostrademons wrote: post #69
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #59

Gad, I am so sick of SEO. Not Jacques article, but SEO in general. Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes. Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody lin…

I'm a little baffled by the suggestions of a whole new protocol to fix this: it seems to me like there's a really easy solution. Just say no to people who want to buy links, or votes, or ask you to take down links. Throw those e-mails in your spam folder. I say this not as a Googler but as someone who struggled with boundary issues as a young adult, where people would ask me unreasonable things and I would comply or…

"If I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operates and having a huge leg up on the competition."

This is a critical point and needs to be underscored. Chasing SEO from a technical perspective is a fool's game. I think SEO can inform your choice of person-to-person marketing activities, but can never take the place of them.

I agree with everything you've said, but I would add one thing: as the complexity of Google's algorithm increases, there's more and more collateral damage. So, for instance, I had a micro-site I made several years ago. Back then the thing to do was to make sure you tweaked your on-page content so that the search engines better understood it.

Flash forward to today. Now if you "over-tweak" (who knows what that means) you get penalized. The same goes for a dozen other topics. They used to either be best practices or work well. Now they're either considered bad practices and you get punished for them. It's completely unrealistic to expect that I am going to have time to go back and re-honk around with stuff because in the great search engine wars the rules change every year.

As far as the protocol thing goes, who knows? I think it's important to realize that we all have the power to do whatever we want on top of TCP-IP. Let a thousand new ideas bloom. See if any of them gain traction.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#72

Post by moultano »

_delirium wrote: post #28
DanBC wrote: post #4

This is a nice description of the hell of modern WWW. But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd. My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page: ( http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/ ) ( http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/ ) > Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selecti…

I noticed this when looking to mail-order some espresso pods: there were eight versions of the same shitty German mail-order company in the top 30 results or so, each trying to look like an independent site targeting a different audience, which you only found out were the same when you tried to check out and saw the same ridiculous extra fees tacked on in the shopping cart. Took forever to find a legit store which wa…

Do you remember your query?

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#73

Post by moultano »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #59

Gad, I am so sick of SEO. Not Jacques article, but SEO in general. Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes. Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody lin…

> Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.

You should read this as shorthand for "build your business the traditional way and the users will come." Don't just count on ranking highly for a competitive query for your business to succeed. Build a brand and customers, and people will seek you out. You will have no difficulty ranking for [the name of your company] and this is where most good sites get most of their traffic from Google.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#74

Post by makomk »

buro9 wrote: post #15

I've received a fair number of these, dating back to late last year and continuing to this day. I'm not sure when Panda came in, but I wouldn't say they've increased or decreased since they started. The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party,…

> None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.

The people sending out the e-mails don't necessarily know that though. Google won't tell sites which links are triggering penalties against them for obvious reasons, and there are a lot of spammy sites posing as user-generated content, far too many to manually review all the backlinks.

Worse, many of those sites aren't attempts at blackhat SEO for the pages they link but are actually trying to rank for particular terms themselves, but as far as I can tell Google doesn't make that distinction - if you're linked from a whole bunch of spammy sites you will now be penalized.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#75

Post by meej »

wmeredith wrote: post #66
DanBC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're right. I tend to use "SEOd" as being a bit sleazy, rather than just following best current practice.

The term "SEO" is a bit like "Hacker" in that to most people it carries a negative connotation.

I've noticed some people will use the terms "black hat SEO" and "white hat SEO" to distinguish between sleazy and not-sleazy SEO practices.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#76

Post by marssaxman »

wmeredith wrote: post #66
DanBC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're right. I tend to use "SEOd" as being a bit sleazy, rather than just following best current practice.

The term "SEO" is a bit like "Hacker" in that to most people it carries a negative connotation.

SEO = gaming search engines = negative behavior.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#77

Post by obstacle1 »

marssaxman wrote: post #76
wmeredith wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term "SEO" is a bit like "Hacker" in that to most people it carries a negative connotation.

SEO = gaming search engines = negative behavior.

White hat SEO = following a search engine's rules = positive behavior.

Disparage not that which you do not understand.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#78

Post by marssaxman »

obstacle1 wrote: post #77
marssaxman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO = gaming search engines = negative behavior.

White hat SEO = following a search engine's rules = positive behavior. Disparage not that which you do not understand.

If the goal of SEO is to manipulate a site's position in search engine rankings, I don't care what color the hat is. I don't want the site's owner to be able to do that. I want the results of my searches to be based on their relevance to my query, and not on the degree to which the people who stand to profit from my attention to their sites have manipulated the system.

The ultimate search engine would be ungameable, and SEO would be a waste of time because it would accomplish nothing. To the degree that SEO works at all, it is a bad thing.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#79

Post by chipsy »

DanBC wrote: post #38
babarock wrote: post #3

I'm "relatively" new to the web. I started using it around 2004. To me, the only way to browse the web goes through Google. I don't think there's a single day I spent in front of the computer without me hitting Google at one point. I even use Google search when I'm specifically targeting Wikipedia or StackOverflow. For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier deca…

> For the people who got introduced to the web before me, how was "web browsing" done in the earlier decade of the Web? I'm assuming Google is not the first search engine available, but I'm pretty sure search engines were not the only way to go around. Yahoo! used to have humans looking at websites and adding them to an index. Yes, someone would send in a link to a porn website, and someone on the porn indexing team…

Seconding the emphasis on "Internet != Web" being more true for the 90's user. It wasn't until 1998 or so that the family computer transitioned from an dial-up shell account with 5mb disk quota (crl.com, which no longer exists) to SLIP/PPP with NetZero. The Web experience via shell account was Lynx-only, and Usenet was still a major source of information, albeit it was riddled with trolling and spam by then.

Re: The Destruction of the Web

#80

Post by Matt_Cutts »

Killah911 wrote: post #57

"Destruction of the Web" is a bit hyperbolic. I tried the SEO game for the interest of my clients, I've come to realize that it's a better long term strategy to simply focus on good, relevant content and let nature take it's course. When you're publishing content targeted at a certain audience, spammy visits to your website just increase your bandwidth cost without much benefit. Granted there is inherent benefit in c…

Just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading this. :)
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