Forum Moderators: phranque
Popular sites get loads of links which give them good rankings . This allows for site optimizers (?) to boost by providing SEO .
however an article that could very relevant to major keyword could not be recognised because search engine optimization fails to take into account the relvancy of the article . it does to an extent with links but my searching has found that if an article is highly relevant and has no SEO then that article could never get high ranking or the kudos it deserves .
This is just not googles flaws but some of the other engines are even worse and done even take links into account or keyword density or other factors. barring meta tags .
I imagine there will be one day a new type of se which could somehow take the accuracy of an article into account as apposed to the links , keywords and stuffed content and not foregtting those lovely google ads.
if an article is highly relevant and has no SEO then that article could never get high ranking or the kudos it deserves .
In general, nothing comes to those who don't make it happen. However, sites often become popular without SEO, happens all the time. Look at ClubPenguin [webmasterworld.com]. SEO and links is not the only way to make a site popular. Some of the most popular sites today are popular without SEO and link building. Some of the most successful ideas for promotion outside of SEO have come from people who know nothing about SEO.
In general, nothing comes to those who don't make it happen.
This is very true. The search engines are not human and they will never be able to decide what is most relevant to any search the way a human could. But then even humans would have a hard time interpreting people's search requirements.
If I am looking for information on how a plasma television works and I do a search for "plasma television" how could a human or a search engine know whether I want to buy one or read about how they work?
I think that over the years people will develop better search skills. They're probably being taught this in school right now and if they are not then they should be.
The example above of the website which has thousands of subscribers is classic and this shows what the youth are up and how well informed ty are about the internet and I am sure we can expect uch more of this in the future. A sort of combination between kids who spend hours on the internet and their favourite games (slightly off topic) , combined with product placement , combined with a shopping experience and hey maybe combined with search or even a cellular experience.
Ahoy . What next....
If I am looking for information on how a plasma television works and I do a search for "plasma television" how could a human or a search engine know whether I want to buy one or read about how they work?
This is actually what XHTML was **supposed** to make happen, but never really did.
If I create a document definition type that clarified the reference of "titanic" in my documents, I could create tags like
The <ship>Titanic</ship> was an iron cruise ship that hit an iceberg in the Atlantic and it really lived up to it's name. It was a ship of <size>titanic</size> proportions. In the 90's they made a movie of it called <movie>Titanic</movie>.
I now have a "smart document" that not only discusses the topic, but defines "what I mean" when I use obscure words in my document. This, of course, would change everything in how search engines indexed documents by topic relevance. I thought this was the coolest thing ever . . . but it never really happened.
[edited by: rocknbil at 8:36 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2007]
If I am looking for information on how a plasma television works and I do a search for "plasma television" how could a human or a search engine know whether I want to buy one or read about how they work?
Search for
how does a plasma television work
Cheeky!
I do actually know how to use Google. My example was to illustrate my point. ;)
It's not *just* search engines being fooled by SEO. In some areas where there is no SEO they are just plain dumb.
Here's a good example.
I just updated my Linux desktop computer to Fedora 8. I was playing with Compiz Fusion (fancy/silly Vista-like desktop effects - spinning cube with multiple desktops, "wobbly windows", etc.) to see if it worked any better now than it did in Fedora Core 6. (It does, but it still needs work!)
Anyway, this got me down the path of "what ARE all these XWindows modules in the sample config files, and which ones do I really want to load?"
For most of them, I simply can't get anything useful out of Google. The top results are all the logs from somebody's build of the module. Who wants to look at that? I know that nobody SEO'd these to the top, because there are no ads. They aren't sites that are monetized. They're often at a University somewhere, and perhaps that's part of the problem. Google likes educational sites. Maybe in this case, a little too much.
OK, these things tend to have short, 3-4 letter names that could be initials for anything. So, let's say there's a module called "ABC". Obviously, if I enter that, I'm going to get kid's readers. So I try "abc XWindows module". Then I get the damn build logs. I have tried *everything* - "documentation", "how to", "configuration", etc.
Just more build logs.
Searching on the special Linux search page doesn't help.
Out of maybe 10 modules that I was curious about, I ultimately learned about 2-3. And that's only because they have pages on Wikipedia. OK, in a couple of cases I also found man pages from the search - but for very few of them, and I had to go down several results pages to find those.
These build logs, of course, contain the name of the module dozens or hundreds of times. Guess keyword spam still works.
Cheeky!
But I've been hearing that argument for years and feel like part of the whole evolution of search thing has to be people understanding how to express their intentions better in a search box. Yes some will do it better than others but I think everyone will improve at it (just think of the percentage of people who can read and write today versus 200 years ago).
