rtfmnews - 4:55 am on Dec 28, 2000 (gmt 0)

This discussion has been extremely interesting. I can't help but toss in a couple of points:

First, anyone paying an SEO is paying for performance. The SEO that delivers high-quality, targeted traffic from relevant keyword searches, is the best SEO from the customer's perspective. There is no good reason for the SEO to "spam" the search engine, because their customer doesn't want that. There is every reason to cloak, because they've spent years perfecting their art.

Second, spam policing is going to be a problem for a long time. SE's make the effort to eliminate a high percentage of the spam, what they can get rid of automatically. It's not worth the effort to manually check on spammers, just to get from 98.5% spam-free to 98.6% spam-free. Unless there's major abuse happening, a search engine can't afford to look into every individual case.

Asking users of the SE to serve as spam police is just an invitation to chaos. Witness the horrible fights at Go.com over "Go Guide" ratings in unpopular categories, that won't deliver more than a few clicks a day at most. Or the number of people who send dozens of emails a week to Open Directory editors. We'll see the SE's gradually refine the definition of spam for their own purposes, based on what their algorithms can handle.

The engines that give you a higher rating based on inclusion in ODP, Yahoo, or Looksmart already have a pretty strong spam filter in place - the people who put those directories together.

Dan0