The right way to think about S.E.O. and social media operations is that it's all about chance -- first you do what you can to get the odds in your favor, then

The right way to think about S.E.O. and social media operations is that it's all about chance -- first you do what you can to get the odds in your favor, then you buy as many tickets as you can. Search engine designers think about it statistically too; Google doesn't understand a damn thing, but the algorithms "bet" that a certain choice will be useful for end users. I was at a machine learning talk lately where they described it as a "multi-armed bandit".