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This is a good point. I don't think this statement is necessarily a good and logically sound axiom, and I think it applies to social networks more than search

This is a good point. I don't think this statement is necessarily a good and logically sound axiom, and I think it applies to social networks more than search engines. I view it as a sort of a zen koan, in the vein of "It can't be all that avant garde if you're using a french word to describe it." At the same time, I think this bears more scrutiny. Intent is important here. Your assumption is that Google organizes information, and that companies are organizing their information in a similar vein in order to facilitate better indexing. If this perfect world is the case, than your argument holds. Unfortunately, I think the reality is frequently different. I think the vast majority of SEO use cases are not the organization of information, but rather the promotion of profitable information and damage control of potentially harmful informaion. You may say to this that analyzing the motives of SEO is a deeply flawed venture, and you'd probably be right. But it is the difference between a system for organizing information and a beaurocracy which only a select few have the resources to navigate.

kaoD 12y ago
Actually I completely agreed with the social network idea, I just don't think it translates well to search engines. It would translate to evil-IAP games ;) SEO is just gaming the system based on how search engines organize their corpus. It's a catch-22 situation, if you organize information, then somebody else can discover patterns in how you organize it and game the system. Based on that, I'd say SEO is evidence of organization. To be fair, Google results have been very accurate for me lately (probably knows more about me than myself), specially since they use click and return rates in their ranking algorithm. Is SEO really such a game-changer for non-tech people? Or am I being victim of SEO tactics without even being aware of it? What amazes me is that you can actually "buy your way into Google" by paying ads... and it's the base of their business!
- Kalium 12y ago
  Bear in mind that SEO is the sort of thing that gets used as a bugbear to explain why a given business is not as popular as the owner feels it should be. Sometimes the problem really is SEO. Often it's something else. By way of comparison, I read a story not long ago where a restaurant owner blamed some incorrect hours of operation data in Google Places for a major drop-off in his business. Yelp reviews, on the other hand, told a story of food and service quality going downhill...

kaoD 12y ago

Actually I completely agreed with the social network idea, I just don't think it translates well to search engines. It would translate to evil-IAP games ;) SEO is just gaming the system based on how search engines organize their corpus. It's a catch-22 situation, if you organize information, then somebody else can discover patterns in how you organize it and game the system. Based on that, I'd say SEO is evidence of organization. To be fair, Google results have been very accurate for me lately (probably knows more about me than myself), specially since they use click and return rates in their ranking algorithm. Is SEO really such a game-changer for non-tech people? Or am I being victim of SEO tactics without even being aware of it? What amazes me is that you can actually "buy your way into Google" by paying ads... and it's the base of their business!

Kalium 12y ago
Bear in mind that SEO is the sort of thing that gets used as a bugbear to explain why a given business is not as popular as the owner feels it should be. Sometimes the problem really is SEO. Often it's something else. By way of comparison, I read a story not long ago where a restaurant owner blamed some incorrect hours of operation data in Google Places for a major drop-off in his business. Yelp reviews, on the other hand, told a story of food and service quality going downhill...