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"Not sure about who is confused but I love when people speak their mind. My clients will disagree with you. In fact, if they didn't get tangible results I'd cease to get clients.
Blanket statements are good for one thing, smothering the truth. The latest Google index is nothing more than data to be analyzed in order to provide better optimization. I never look at the index as good or bad, it's just another opportunity to continue the learning process.
Next week it will be business as usual. The SEOs that have been at it awhile took a look at this index, shrugged and started the analysis. Some clients panicked and reached for the phone, others smiled and started preparing for an increase in business. Next month, the exact same thing will occur all over again. I love this business... "
So, since we have some confusion here as to the utter worthlessness of SEOs, let me elaborate on my statement.
( First let me say that I never implied SEOs are more worthless than, say, ODP editors. All humans have some inherent worth, no matter how small. )
First, let us accept the fact that Google is like a god. You can be tops on Yahoo! ( which I am ) and still Google sends more traffic.
I make this point because I mean to show that SEOs are not needed where Google is concerned.
They may be nice if Yahoo! gives you an bad initial listing, w/o any of the keywords you tried to stuff in there. SEOs usually can brown nose a Yahoo! editor into adding four or five keywords back into the descrition.
But for Google, read this:
Be very careful about allowing an individual consultant or company to 'optimize' your web site. Chances are they will engage in some of our "Don'ts" and end up hurting your site.
If Google says not to do it, don't.
I had several top listings on Inktomi and Google, paid a pro several thousand to optimize it, and boom, no traffc. Just like Google says.
I know of a competitor, with $29 million invested in their URL, and thanks to SEO they have no top listed keywords. Thanks to SEOs they get to pay Overture and Google Adwords for all their traffic.
SEOs like to say, "You won't get to the top w/o us". Its BS.
Google is set up to give optimized sites nothing, while sites who don't give a damn about Google get top listing. ( Not in all cases. )
Case in point:
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">
<TITLE><snip></TITLE>
This site has a #1 listing for <snip>. It has no keywords. And it has a title of <snip>
Now if that isn't getting to the top in spite of yourself, what is?
SEOs are not needed. They do more harm than good.
Content is everything.
[edited by: Marcia at 3:41 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
[edit reason] no specifics, per charter and TOS [/edit]
BUT the page has 28 backlinks. Of the half dozen I checked, half used the whole company name - "Keyword1 Keyword2", and the other half used only the first word of the name: "Keyword1".
In this case, given that the keywords are in the company name, it might be pure dumb luck that such a result has been achieved.... or it might have been an SEO who knows a bit about the effects of density, dilution and how to fly under the radar. :) Ok ok, I'm really just stirring the pot.. I can't get past the page title either.
The page is, however, strong reinforcement of the importance of text in backlinks and (and pagerank presumably)... now there's a very SEO sort of topic.
I think the thing is that SEO is an emerging and unregulated industry with no standards or quality control, and what SEOs do is a mystery to the great majority of their clients.... therefore it is wide open to abuse.
If you hired a plumber and he started to unclog your drain using your vacuum cleaner and a roasting fork you might look a bit suspiciously at him wouldn't you? That's because you know what the problem is with a clogged drain, you know more or less what a plumber does, and you can at least guess at what tools might look appropriate. Not to mention that you've probably hired a registered master plumber in the first place if you've any sense at all.
Unfortunately, I think SEO will remain wide open to cowboys for quite some time... and is quite likely to suffer a decline in public perceptions until some sort of standards or benchmarking is established.
The difficulty is how this could be achieved in an industry where the search engines change the rules every five minutes (not saying they shouldn't.. just that it's a fact that they do.)
There will, however, remain certain basic good practices in design and SEO, which will form the core 'value' of the industry to webmasters. SEO isn't going to go away. It just hasn't quite grown up yet.
Do a backlink search. The actual links are the word, <snip> So my question is this:
If google did an anti-google bombing tweak to lessen the power of backlink text spam, then why is this site #1?
Is the algo tweak limited to keywords of more than one word in length?
Or does this mean that the tweak never happened?
[edited by: Marcia at 3:02 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
[edit reason] sorry, specific removed per TOS [/edit]
I haven't read most of the update threads, but I did notice mention of that. Personally I have my doubts about it happening - or its effectiveness if it did.
I just checked on a site that was raised here as a question a month or two ago. From memory it was number one for the term (a motorcycle brand) but the site in fact had nothing on it... nothing, zip, nada. The position was coming from the 42 backlinks, which were based on the site name/brand name. I wondered at the time whether the site had been live at the previous update and we were seeing it since the site was removed.
Apparently not. I just searched again, the site is still there at position five. Still nothing on the site - except a frameset with NOTHING in the master frame and a sub-frame containing the domain-name reseller's homepage.
Backlinks still seem to rule... particularly when there is no on-page content to contradict the backlinks.
I think you have raised an interesting topic and I hope I can do it proper justice with a valid response.
I have to admit that I don't wholly agree with the statement "the utter worthlessness of SEO's" or "Buy SEO and you get nothing".
I believe that SEO is like any business. There are thieves and liars in every business and the more educated you are when you make a decision to employ services of this type you are able to make a better selection. Just because there are companies/individuals in a given business sector who are shady or deceptive does not mean that everyone who does this type of business operates as such.
There are definitely companies/individuals out there that this applies to but blanket statements are always wrong and most often border on prejudice.
Google is like a God
In my experience this varies in accordance to the targetted market. Google, Yahoo and MSN alternate in my top referrer spot. Some of the sites which I work with google is a distant third. This is not because the rankings aren't there, it just means different things work for different situations.
The specific situations that you quote at the end of your post that, unfortunately, prove the fact that not every company is fully above board but it is unfortunate that you apply this to every company that works within this industry.
When you refer to optimization it would seem that you equate this term with spam. I do not believe that is the case though. If all websites were created in a manner that kept user experience and spiderability in the forefront of their mission, I wouldn't have a job. This is not the case. Website content and usability rules are not the same as other media, therfore, you would seek a specialist in this field to provide this service. Someone who specializes in radio ads would not be your best choice for a television campaign.
As to your reference to a specific search term and site I think you should refer to the TOS [webmasterworld.com].
[edited by: Marcia at 3:04 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
[edit reason] specific keyword removed [/edit]
That is SEO
As for referring to SEO as spam, isn't it? SEO as I refer to it is changing mata tags to deceive search engines.
I see a lot of sites on the top without changing their meta tags or throwing in dozens of keywords to achieve "good density".
"traffic development counseling"
Excellent term!
I was trying to think of something exactly on those lines to describe what I see as a possible future more 'developed' SEO industry.
SEO should be more than "this is how to beat this particular search engine".
I do believe that those who take a more rounded approach along the lines of "traffic development counselling" are the SEOs who will still be around and going strong when the dust settles.
[edited by: Marcia at 3:05 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
"SEO as spam"
NOOOO! :) At least not the way I look at it.
SEO is about presenting relevant information in such a way as to make it easily accessible to the most appropriate audience through search engines, indexes, or whatever other mediums apply.
<disclaimer> that's my def at least.. your mileage may vary</disclaimer>
If you define spam type approaches as SEO, then no wonder you're saying 'bad, bad, bad'. :)
If you build your business on SE don'ts and not improve the value of the site or use irrelevant links it is. Link building to get valuable referrals that not only build your PR but garner on topic referrals that convert would seem to be part of the "traffic development counseling" approach.
I don't want my clients to only get better rankings. I want them to increase conversion rates and make more sales. I want them to gain a broader traffic base and if one month google freaks out to not go out of business. I want users who come to the site to find it easy to navigate and fast to facilitate the gathering of information on a given service. I want people to find me in the top 10 and after researching the top 10 find that my client's site offered the best experience and was the most comprehensive and then buy from them.
There are a lot of us that practice good business and focus on providing value to our clients. :)
To my mind SEO was an activity that was born in an opportunistic window while the first search engines started indexing the web and developing models back in early inktomi, infoseek, idg days and later the birth of AV. Back then these engines just wanted raw data to experiment with, and algos were mainly based on text analysis. It was possible early to get to the top of a keyword listing in a flash. It was at the start of the real Web commercial boom when commercial sites started for the first time to outnumber government, homepage, rudimentary company home pages, education, hobby interest, and research sites which had been ported from FTP and gopher protocol sites.
It is just plain common sense that these companies would turn their development costs somehow into revenue in the future. But just like most ventures in those times the market was overcrowded and strategies were naive. That extended the window for SEO. The fact was that a spin-off industry - the SEO industry - was making heaps while the search engines which provided their only basis of operation was bleeding. This could not continue for long, though bad decisions on the part of the Search engine industry extended it.
It was also a time when the other mantra was "The Web is free". Hogwash of course. While taking advantage of the "free internet" a new breed of opportunists thought they could make money off something that was free. A contradiction in terms. Some did, but the vast majority didnt, and in the long term nobody will, though imnot arguing that some of the techniques of SEO are useless. Those that are just based on good document publishing design such as clear and descriptive titles, natural linkages, and summarizing through sections, taglines and headlines will always work. But the publishing (and advertising) industries were doing that far
before the advent of the Web, or the internet for that matter.
One thing that happened was that algos became increasingly complex, one reason (but of course not the only) being to counter spam - as the SEO industry was begining to make Search engines suboptmal in reaching their goal- returning relevant results. Including external factors such as link analysis was a great step forward. I do beleive that Google for example can now build enough complexity, deliberate changes and just plain planned randomness into their algos to make spam and SEO far less valuable in future.
In those SEO discussions i referred to, most psotive contributions seems to concur that "narrow" SEO WAS dead (and we are talking 1 to 3 years back), but that SEO's should braoden their job specs under new names such as "On-line marketing professional" genre names. SEO and the internet is NOT a cottage industry anymore. It requires a high level of knowledge of how to expose and promote sites on the internet. Apart from "word density" it now includes link placement and analysis, design, off line promotion, and much much more.
I dont think SEO is bad. But just by itself it is fast becoming redundant. While the Web moves fast, it is curious that so many are using the simple techniques of yesterday rather than making promotion decisions based on a full understanding of Web trends and promotion that can only come with a professional understanding of how the internet works.
[edited by: chiyo at 3:28 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
And "unoptimizing" what they've done to themselves can help save their business altogether. I hate to break the news, but Mom 'n Pop are some of the worst spammers around, they're just not sophisticated at it. They hear from their friends about keywords in domain names, they buy up and point a few. They hear about link popularity and they hook up with link farms - and point links to all the domain names to get more listings, even though there might not be a relevant piece of text on their pages.
The first thing I usually have to do is remove the alt tags, comment tags and meta tags with hundreds of words of keyword stuffing and whole paragraphs in them. The next step is to tear through the links page and get rid of the bad neighborhoods. Those are the emergency measures.
Then you sometimes have to deal with their webmaster who put them up a site that cannot be spidered. They paid through the nose and didn't have a clue. All they know is meta tags, monthly submission to thousands of search engines and link exchanges. One paid hundreds in a couple of months for a links only seo program - by an seo with a PR0 site of their own. It was a lucky escape.
We can educate them into success and actually get them to take irrelevancies and dangerous tactics off their sites and get some relevant, useful content into the site.
Those don't need gimmicks, they need cleaning up and just making a better, more usable site. And when they get where they need to be they stick like glue because they don't rely on the latest fad.
As a service to small business owners, it's the most benevolent occupation I can think of. We should be ordained. ;)
[edited by: Marcia at 3:29 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
Okay, now we've gone from SEO professionals as used car salesan to SEOs as Saints.
Also well said by mosley700:
Google is giving a lot of weight to how another site describes yours.
Followed by this from deejay:
SEO is about presenting relevant information in such a way as to make it easily accessible to the most appropriate audience through search engines
Chiyo made reference to the seo is dead theme, and if you can perhaps expand on that thought, relevant to this months situation, I think it would help people (like me) better understand what's going on.
I have a sinking feeling that the algo has been tweaked to take away our ability to define our web sites and handed it over to the web sites that are linking into us.
This authority goes deeper than merely the text on the links. I'm not going to say any more.
Google is giving a lot of weight to how another site describes yours
Very well put! Google has been extending this every update for quite a while. In fact it is the basis of the theory of PR and link popularity. Its really just the citation indexing beloved of research indexes like the Science Citation Index. It works on the theory that the more people cite your work, the more important it is.
Translating this to the Web and a very commercial mainstream medium has its challenges. But it is a sound basis for building an authoritative index.
A large body of opinion here stated that PR was "too academic" and didnt work in the "real world" because people would spam it. Much of this was false hope. As Google increases the sophistication of their algos to catch "citation spam" and reduce value of reciprocal links and links from related or non-authoritative sources, the theory is, on the contrary, winning over the reciprocal link/citation spam.
Martini. I'm only an amateur search engine strategy observer, but for what it's worth, I think the implications of my previous post for this month's update is that Google has made a significant step forward in creating an algo complex enough to make most amateur or simplistic SEO cost-ineffective, therefore allowing google the breathing room to develop an even more relevant index.
As with any significant step forward there may well be some transient tangential mistakes... It has hurt some, especially in competitive keywords that have only looked at optimizing by a few urban legend methods, and mostly in the last few months only. I beleive also some portion of Googles algo focuses on site history over time. More established sites seem to have an edge in this update rather than new sites. The update thread revealed a mass of web masters who were highly disappointed that their SEO efforts over the past month had not only resulted in success, but also resulted in maybe some sort of penalty.
So the latest update is just an extension of the trend where SEO is becoming less relevant, if seem in simple terms. Those SEO people who have broadened in their technqiues and methods (like orginal content and organization, freshness, and real legitimate incoming links) are on much safer ground.
Its not easy, but nothing comes easy. I have a feeling that many feel SEO is a quick easy way to a fortune. It may have been for a few early on, like the shark company that made an adventure movie on the proceeds! But the internet industry moves on, and simple SEO no longer cuts it anymore. Now you have to be aware of the latest trends in a multitude of areas. And if you know the "over 100" criteria that google has publicly stated are used in their ranking, you are some part of the way there! At least for last month. ;)
At least for last month
This means.. -> no future.. ;)
cminblues
Extending the research paper citation analogy. Google's main problem in extending this to the Web, is that sources in academic or scientific research are already "peer" reviewed. So to get listed in a citation index as a souce you have already gone through usually several rounds of peer review to be accepted. Now this didn't happen for web pages, so google chose ODP (building on the community of "objective" review here) and Y! (paying is the quick way in which seems to forgive a thousand sins though there is some critical review) as a replacement form of this. I also suspect they use other algos to determine "authorities" too like high page rank pages, maybe selected pages, and maybe educational sources. This is imperfect but peer review is expensive and time consuming. Once the quality of the sources (there are problems as we all know in the legitimacy of odp and y! listings), is improved then it helps with this problem.
My feeling is that will improve their ways of selecting authorities maybe by hub analysis and other things over time, to the extent they can drop ODP and Y! as such big determinants of authority, and therefore PR.
Wow. Nice post. The title of this thread was (unintentinally?) the right one.
Perhaps it's my personality, but I believe in the existentialist philosophy of will. Of taking control and defining your life, as opposed to having it defined for you.
I also believe in the extension of that philosophy, which Camus elaborated so well in the Myth of Sisyphus, wherein yes, it's illogical to keep at a project that seems futile, but it nevertheless is the truly logical thing to do.
All web sites have two audiences. As good web designers, we should endeavour to define our sites not only for the human surfer, but also to the search engines.
Most web designers forget this basic tenet. So, when the spider crawls, it believes that the relevance of a particular site is for somthing as random as the words "hello" and "software".
In other words, what is disturbing is that Google has wrested my ability to define my site to the audience and the search engines and placed the responsibility on another web site, whose title tag MAY or MAY NOT be relevant for me.
I have done some research that demonstrates that not only does the anchor text give relevance, but that the title tag of the referring site ALSO gives weight to the web site being linked to.
I'm all for relevance. That's why I structure a site so that it is relevant. But this shift of definition control is what's responsible for some awkward Google serps. The relevance is missing on quite a few searches.
I hope that Google eases up on this so that people who can define a site properly can have their voices heard, too. I love Google. They're great. But I think that this current algo needs a little adjustment.
:) Y
[edited by: martinibuster at 9:13 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
Nice and well done analysis.
In this scenario, in fact, the SEO's work become very hard to maintain.
Either
1] the SEO is an optimizer/spammer
or either
2] the SEO is giving good/richcontent-etc sites
or either 1+2.
He have to do with a very solid and complex beast.
cminblues
i.e. those sites which have been developed along sustainable lines have benefited.
My view of SEO is that it is mostly common sense. Follow the basic principles rigorously and you will succeed, try and get a quick fix and you are likely to fail.
It is just like any other profession, there is a two year apprenticeship where you learn the trade. Once you learn the trde you apppreciate the craftsmanship of those who are well regarded in the profession.
Any professional knows the tricks of the trade, i'm sure an experienced plumber would be able to identify and fix a leak in a central heating system faster than an amateur with less risk of flooding the house and damaging your £20/square meter carpet, similarly an experienced SEO can get results faster and at less risk than an amateur.
As was said previously I look at my results for this update (some up - some down) look at why this occurred and look at a plan of action for each of the sites that went down.
It gets old when everyone brags about GOOGLE and this type of inconsitency keeps happening!
