Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
But try searching for the lowest air fare to Prague, or a cheap family holiday in Orlando, and Google gets confused, throwing up many thousands of websites, a few of which have paid large sums of money to come near the top of the results.
Google gets confused! LOL!
Nice idea about paying to get to the top of the SERPs though - is that lible?
The rest of it isn't much better - shows a complete lack of understanding and research into the whole affiliate industry.
OK, it's nice that they are picking up on the whole G$ thing but this kind of (possibly libleous) badly researched rubbish doesn't help anyone.
Ya, the travel sector continues to be all the engines biggest junk sites problem.
Nice idea about paying to get to the top of the SERPs though - is that lible?
Libel requires malicious intent.
Dumb article, though. The writer is comparing apples and oranges.
Couldn't read page 2 either:
"There appears to be a temporary server failure, please try later."
Couldn't get past first page - did not want to really anyway.
Yep as EFV says it is comparing apples to oranges.
Idoc - affiliate piffle - he is singing the praises of an affiliate site in the article. (and a bit of a spammy sub-domain one at that)
Many internet users assume that, while sponsored links on search engines are bought and sold, regular results are based purely on relevance. Not true. Search engine optimisation (SEO) software enables firms to bury coded words into their web pages, forcing them up the lists of results. SEO is a black art and doesn’t come cheap: some companies pay thousands per month to SEO providers (Google receives no money) to have their sites tweaked.
It's particularly unfortunate that someone comes out with an article claiming this at a time when it's harder to purposefully manipulate the SERPs than previously.
Also I'm not that sure what the point of the article is at all:
It's hard to get to the top of a competitive field and may take both time and money - err, welcome to the real world.
My other favourite line is:
Some of these are emerging as the new giants of online travel, others are obscure little sites put together by enthusiastic amateurs.
Anyway, all those of you who where hoping the press would pick up on the 302 issue should read what a hash up they can make of the simplest SE related issues! The mind boggles at what this guy would come out with on that topic!
SEO used to be more of an art than a black art. IMHO, writing good content that is indexable, weighting keywords, positioning text on page etc. *was* an art. Scraping your competitor, redirecting or framing content that doesn't belong to you etc. is more black art to me than art. The doesn't come cheap part is a no-brainer. i.e. What does a good on topic pr7 or pr8 inbound text link or a press release that will give good inbound pr links cost?
Er, I thought this was called Marketing!
You have to consider here that the writer is a regular "joe surfer". He doesn't know the inner workings of seo or adwords marketing or how the engines work... nor should he *have to* to find a hotel.
Absolutely!
The rest of you guys should take of your webmaster and SEO hats for a minute and look at this from the outside. That's what the journalist did (btw what have his earning got to do with it?) If you look at this from the outside as Joe Surfer then it is a good article, quite accurate and providing good advice.
I do quite a bit of traveling myself and when looking for hotels or car hire I seldom have much success on Google (or any search engine for that matter). I tend to use sites that I know will deliver value, including some of those listed in the article. So don't dismiss this a irrelevant. It is the second negative article about Google this week in the UK. Watch this space.
In any case the trust of the ST article was true.
The travel sector is completely bogged down by spam. The directory sites are nothing but absolute spam. They scrap information off legitimate websites, many run by families, and aggregate that information to show ads and then sell the top spots to the website owners whos information they're basically stealing. You can't complain because if you do, they remove you from their directories and your competition stays.
I personally would love to see a US based news organization sue Google for their news aggregation service and win. The directory sites are not helping the web -- they're cluttering it up.
Granted the travel side of web search is far from ideal but this article is beyond naive. OK firstly why pick on Google in particular, Google is possibly the least spammy in this area (so little or no research there). By all means have a go at Google (I often do) but not on this one!
Next, why make comments about passing on the cost, a being cheaper than b, when in fact 90% of these sites use the same booking engines. (less research there)
And - what's the news. I read a better article about air fares nearly 2 years ago.
Finally, why should online marketing be any different to other marketing. Just because Google is free (up to a point) doesn't make it a not for profit industry.
btw what have his earning got to do with it?
when looking for hotels or car hire I seldom have much success on Google (or any search engine for that matter)
As a somewhat experienced searcher, SEO, and travel site owner, I have to agree. I have spent several days looking for a vacation package for myself this week, and it has been a frustrating excercise.
Convenient on-line research and shopping for travel? It has been time consuming and annoying. Gave up, called a travel agent and got what I wanted in an hour....
The travel sector is completely bogged down by spam. Google gets confused! The author, as Joe Surfer, properly reports that it doesn't work well enough for him.
"Many internet users assume that, while sponsored links on search engines are bought and sold, regular results are based purely on relevance. Not true."
Granted the travel side of web search is far from ideal but this article is beyond naive.
With respect it is not naive. He properly reported his experience on Google. Also I don't see your problem with ...
Some of these are emerging as the new giants of online travel, others are obscure little sites put together by enthusiastic amateurs.
He is 100% correct in what he says here, why do you dispute this? It may be that some of the enthusiastic amateurs have actually become giants (a la Gates, Brin and Page) but his statement is nonetheless true. He did not say that the enthusiastic amateurs were not making a living from it.
google gets confused
I agree.
Hopefully, more stories like the one in the Sunday Times will compel Google to get tougher on spammers.
Google has to choose.
Either makes happy the hundreds of smart spammers still on top of the SERPs or decides to satisfy the search needs of Joe Surfer.
Being now a public company, the right choice is the second one.
Otherwise, Google will slowly die like Infoseek, Altavista, etc.
What I gather from the article is what many of us have known for awhile. Google results suck these days. Whether it is not being able to find a hotel website because their site is "sandboxed", or coming across of myriad of travel/adsense scraper sites, Joe Surfer is not impressed.
But I guess Google can stick to suing people over domains, auto-linking people's sites, and battling SEO on stupid issues. I expect to see plenty more of these articles over the next few months.
<Funny, it doesn't seem to be very confused displaying the AdSense on the three pages of this story>
With all due respect, what has this to do with the content of the article?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) software enables firms to bury coded words into their web pages, forcing them up the lists of results. SEO is a black art...
So therefore I think it discredits the entire story, despite the fact that most of it's true.
Also the point he makes is the opposite to reality - if the SERPs were based entirely on content, titles etc the results would be even worse - what does he expect Google to do about sorting the however many million hotel sites?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) software enables firms to bury coded words into their web pages, forcing them up the lists of results. SEO is a black art...
If you had to define SEO in one sentence to an audience of people who most probably would not be interested in the technicalities I think the above is close enough. It's the public he's talking to not the SEO community.
All of you who are trying to dismantle this article should bear that in mind. You should also bear in mind that almost anything you read in the media could be torn apart by the experts in the area in the subject matter. Reporters cannot be expert at everything so all they can do is report what they see and I think that is what Jon Honeyball did ;)
what does he expect Google to do about sorting the however many million hotel sites?
They (and the other SEs) could start by putting the hotel websites at or near the top on a search for the hotel name. I would be willing to bet that 95% of those who search for widget hotel smallville would prefer it that way.
<It was just a joke, reseller. Sorry if it wasn't a very good one;-) >
Friends :-)
<Search engine optimisation (SEO) software enables firms to bury coded words into their web pages, forcing them up the lists of results. SEO is a black art...
So therefore I think it discredits the entire story, despite the fact that most of it's true. >
Blame it on the SEO/SEM Community. Maybe its the fault of the SEO/SEM community which hasn't been successful to "educate" the public and explain what SEO/SEM are about.
Average surfers are met mostly with pop-up/under and unsolicited emails promoting SEO software of different kinds. People hear about selling links of sites with high PR. People see sites using black hat SEO techniques under the name of SEO. The few people outside the SEO/SEM community who know something about SEO/SEM think that its about tricking the search engines and adding magic codes to webpages.
The same apply for the Affiliate Marketing community. When reading some posts on these forums, one get the impression that affiliate marketing is the dirt of internet. Nobody is mentioning the hundreds of merchants and thousands of affiliates who follow ethical marketing methods. And even those affiliates who do a great PRE-SELL and add value to the affiliate program are met with less kind words.
And how about AdSense publishers? They are not in better position than SEO/SEM and affiliate marketing communities. People talk about "AdSense sites" and "AdSense targeted pages" and you name it.
It is just about to be a crime to make money on the internet, except for the big dogs!
We should keep in mind that there is a big world outside these forums and journalists mostly write for that big world. It isn't wise to defend Google blindly and meet critics of Google from outside world with words like "Clueless" "rubbish" "jiberish." etc..
And why should anybody defend Google?
Google is waging a war in daylight against the SEO/SEM community and several evidence on these forums are pointing to that direction. The quality of Google serps is in decline. Google is penalizing innoncents publishers because somebody decided to hijack their contents etc.. etc..
Why should anybody defend that?
People should shop around more, granted. But in some industries, original sites get burried so far down, I'd give up too.
