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I think SEO is a dead disciple walking, it's like cheating to me. Should be Search Engine business to find out the best websites for your searches, not your bus

I think SEO is a dead disciple walking, it's like cheating to me. Should be Search Engine business to find out the best websites for your searches, not your business to make your pages suited for X or Y searches even if they are poorly interesting.

patio11 16y ago
SEO is to search engines as PR is to journalists. There is a whole spectrum of cynicism, but at the less cynical end, "They won't cover your product unless you wrap it up in an appealing story." I have often thought that one of Google's great coups in marketing is convincing many programmers that there algorithm, unique among all others known to man, has moral authority. Nobody ever says that about travelling salesman heuristic approaches... Maybe this is due to the pervasive misconception that search engine algorithms actually measure quality of content, or that they could.
- randfish 16y ago
  I think that's an excellent analogy - couldn't have put it better myself. SEO is doing all the right things to make your content and hard work as accessible and shareable as possible.
- pw 16y ago
  You've said this before about Google, but I only just now realized what you're getting at: What's to say that my (hypothetical) site that shows up #9 on Google shouldn't be #1 and that users wouldn't benefit from it being #1? Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that is an argument one can make.
  - patio11 16y ago
    Right. (Sorry if I didn't make that explicit before: I take for granted that SEO can provide value for users, too.) A very optimistic person could say that the search results are due not just to Google's algorithms but the cooperation of Google's algorithms and webmasters optimizing for them, and that without both of these elements, the Internet would be a much poorer place than it is currently. One example is meta description tags. That is useful for site owners (good snippets increase CTR), useful for users (good snippets make the search results magically better by telling you what you're going to get before the click), and useful for Google. Good meta description tags only exist because of SEOs and do not follow under the frequently argued "Meh, that is just a common web usability guideline" shibboleth. To the best of my knowledge no common user agent surfaces them anywhere users can see them. They exist because they're used for search engine result pages, and that's all.

patio11 16y ago

SEO is to search engines as PR is to journalists. There is a whole spectrum of cynicism, but at the less cynical end, "They won't cover your product unless you wrap it up in an appealing story." I have often thought that one of Google's great coups in marketing is convincing many programmers that there algorithm, unique among all others known to man, has moral authority. Nobody ever says that about travelling salesman heuristic approaches... Maybe this is due to the pervasive misconception that search engine algorithms actually measure quality of content, or that they could.

randfish 16y ago
I think that's an excellent analogy - couldn't have put it better myself. SEO is doing all the right things to make your content and hard work as accessible and shareable as possible.
pw 16y ago
You've said this before about Google, but I only just now realized what you're getting at: What's to say that my (hypothetical) site that shows up #9 on Google shouldn't be #1 and that users wouldn't benefit from it being #1? Maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't, but that is an argument one can make.
- patio11 16y ago
  Right. (Sorry if I didn't make that explicit before: I take for granted that SEO can provide value for users, too.) A very optimistic person could say that the search results are due not just to Google's algorithms but the cooperation of Google's algorithms and webmasters optimizing for them, and that without both of these elements, the Internet would be a much poorer place than it is currently. One example is meta description tags. That is useful for site owners (good snippets increase CTR), useful for users (good snippets make the search results magically better by telling you what you're going to get before the click), and useful for Google. Good meta description tags only exist because of SEOs and do not follow under the frequently argued "Meh, that is just a common web usability guideline" shibboleth. To the best of my knowledge no common user agent surfaces them anywhere users can see them. They exist because they're used for search engine result pages, and that's all.