Forum Moderators: phranque
SE Capitalism is my term for buying the top spots. A good placement in Yahoo can now be bought like it can on other SE’s. Artificially influencing a placement is what I call SE Spam.
Given that the big guys have the big dollars and the bad guys are skilled at spamming, I wonder whether I would be better off abandoning SE optimization and turn my focus to email or some other form of advertising.
Is Search Engine Optimization quickly becoming obsolete?
Do the consumers need to be protected from search engine manipulations?
No but they are becoming aware (or will in due course) that they are increasinly getting demand led advertising .. is that a problem?
I was think about deceptive advertising. Here is a PC Week article about a request for a Federal Trade Commission investigation.
Here's the url [pcworld.com...]
'"The problem is when they insert advertising within their editorial content without telling us the ads are ads, it becomes deceptive advertising," says Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert executive director. "They omit key information that the ad is an ad." '
With the search engines becoming biased with advertising, does it make sense to struggle with optimizing submissions?
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"The problem is when they insert advertising within their editorial content without telling us the ads are ads"
Sure I agree with this but there is in fact some kind of perverse balance returning to the search engines now that a bigger budget can get the larger companies to the top of the lists again .. it was the case that a canny programmer could make their spamsite appear higher than some less techcompetent but perhaps much more substantial business competitors, add to that the fact that small co's or individuals can appear as impressive on the web as some big corporate sites and you also had a real potential for misinformation.
The ability to get a high page ranking for a search term did not have to reflect that the company behind the page knew anything about the products or services, just that their programmer knew the best tricks for the SE in question.
"With the search engines becoming biased with advertising, does it make sense to struggle with optimizing submissions? "
Well while you can get results yes it must still make sense.
The situation is reverting a little as the commercial realities start to bite .... what the SE's are finding imho is that they must not bite the hand that feeds them. Companies paying advertising were probably pretty iritated when 16yr old joe bloggs ranked higher than their team built all java showcase webventure....
devils advocate. :-)
