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".
....? where did the idea of "The East Africa stuff" being made up come from?
Nowhere. It was speculation on my part extrapolated from the premise that the piece was written as a joke and nothing in it could be taken at face value. A little research on the guy suggests I was reading too much into it. Here he is http://www.linkedin.com/in/rishilakhani and his languages are listed as "Hindi, Swahili, Gujarati, Punjabi" - we don't need much more than that to connect the dots.
It's more like new cars being introduced without service manuals, forcing the mechanic to continually figure out how to fix them.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Google's job is to make sure good content is ranked high and crap is ranked low. You should just create content that is useful to others and let Google figure out how to discover it and rank it high (they are good at it). To create useful content, you don't need to know Google internals.
If this were truly the case, we shouldn't expect quality sites to benefit from SEO. In practice, they do.
Keep up the good work Google. I hope this serves as encouragement for them to continue to screw over those who want to turn searching for relevant information into a war for who can cheat the system the best.
Plus one. SEO is absolutely annoying. If a site is built correctly and there is interest in the service or topic the site provides, then the product will be found. Stuffing keywords into title and heading tags along with other grey area SEO techniques really devalues the internet. I see SEO along the same lines as buying domains that you think may have value and sitting on them. Games like this hinder progress and re…
Depends what you mean. If you mean people whose goal it is to help site owners learn how to structure their data intelligently for dissection by machines, people who make companies think very hard about their content, people who encourage high-quality crosslinks and meta tags, and people who generally help sites manage data, then no, SEOs are great. They help users and companies alike. If you mean the dirtball black…
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 say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.
As long as search results are determined by algorithms, there will be search engine optimization. Why? Because every algorithm can be optimized for something. And as long as search engine optimization exists, engaging in it will be a competitive advantage. Why would you NOT want your site to appear at the top of the search results for as many keywords as possible? Your job as a business owner is to bring as many cust…
Just because something is good for my business, doesn't mean it's good for society. SEO (beyond actually making your site more valuable) is a classic prisoner's dilemma.
I think this is where my views differ from many on HN. As a business owner, I will do whatever is best for my business, without regards to what is best for society. My job is not to worry about what is best for society -- that job belongs to the government. The government sets the rules and we play the game. As long as I am not breaking any laws, I will do whatever it takes to bring my business to the top. I have to do this because if I don't, somebody else will. Riding a moral high horse will only lead to my business being stampeded by others who are willing to engage in tactics I am not.
This is not to say that I actively work against what's best for society. My point is that I will do what's best for my business, with regard to nothing else. I think that is what makes a good business owner. Another trait of a good business owner is the belief that his business provides the best value in its market. If you truly believe that, then by engaging in SEO to rank your business at the top of its market, you ARE doing what's best for society. If you suggest that engaging in SEO tactics to rank your business at the top is BAD for society, then you are inherently suggesting that your business does not provide the best value to its market.
That robots.txt is so big that even with comments maybe google will drop it after trying to parse it for a while....
I bet they are fairly liberal with their size limits: http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt http://aws.amazon.com/robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt http://store.apple.com/robots.txt
Keep up the good work Google. I hope this serves as encouragement for them to continue to screw over those who want to turn searching for relevant information into a war for who can cheat the system the best.
As long as search results are determined by algorithms, there will be search engine optimization. Why? Because every algorithm can be optimized for something. And as long as search engine optimization exists, engaging in it will be a competitive advantage. Why would you NOT want your site to appear at the top of the search results for as many keywords as possible? Your job as a business owner is to bring as many cust…
its not that people are anti-SEO, its what you so-called "seo experts" think SEO is. As far as I'm concerned, optimizing for search engines means using best practices in designing the website. That includes, rich content, proper title and description meta, link text and title that describes the destination properly, alt/title for image and proper use of headings. SEO and accessibility go hand in hand. The marketing aspect of SEO, is integrating social media and targeted advertisement. If what your content is worth it, link building should come naturally.
If you go beyond these practices and try all these scams to build fake reputation for your worthless website then you truly do not deserve to be on the internet. Trying to scam your way up the SERPs is an awful thing to do and it just ends up pushing better qualified website down, eventually, ruining the online experience for millions of people who now have to take more time out of their lives to find the relevant information they need.
SEO is a must for every website, but if you try to scam your way up the ladder, you deserve to be thrown off it.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Google's job is to make sure good content is ranked high and crap is ranked low. You should just create content that is useful to others and let Google figure out how to discover it and rank it high (they are good at it). To create useful content, you don't need to know Google internals.
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.