A few weeks ago, John Dvorak wrote an article on pcmag.com titled Why Google Must Die. It’s all about how SEO is destroying the internet, puppies, and rainbows. It’s SEO is the Worst Thing Ever Invented all over again.
Actually, Dvorak takes a bit of a different spin than the typical “SEO helps the terrorists win” perspective. He asserts that businesses need SEO because Google sucks so much and can’t figure out what relevant results are for searchers unless site owners give them a little help. Danny Sullivan and others took him to task on Sphinn, breaking down his points one by one.
Watch us battle it out on Cranky Geeks
I’ll be on Dvorak’s show Cranky Geeks this week to fight it out, er, I mean discuss it with him in a professional manner. I had a great time last time I was on the show, and I’m looking forward to another chance to be geeky yet cranky. You can tune in live Wednesday, December 10th at 12:30 or download the podcast later from the site or from Tivo.
Dvorak is right. Sorta.
I don’t think Dvorak is entirely off the mark, although I do think he’s a bit misguided. He’s right that search engines could do a better job, and in their defense, they’ve got lots of people working on it, all the time. They’re working at improving crawling technologies such as Flash, and they’re always in an arms race with spammers. But they’re not perfect, and part of SEO is to make up for some of the shortcomings that search engines have.
The major search engines are at their cores, text-based, so they do best at indexing and ranking text-based content. Because they aren’t better at other forms of media, sites who care about being found by searchers have to ensure they are building search-friendly sites.
It’s not Google’s responsibility to make sure your customers can find you
It is Google’s responsibility to keep building a better product, and to that end, they and other search engines will undoubtedly continue to work at improving how they handle non-text content, how they deal with spam, and how they calculate relevance.
But it’s the responsibility of every business to make their sites search engine-friendly to improve their businesses.
Dvorak says:
it [SEO] centers around the idea that Google sucks so much that companies think they need to use SEO to get the results they deserve.
In my opinion, SEO centers around the idea that as a business, it’s important to understand the space you’re operating in. If you open a store, you may want to scout out real estate options. Should you open it at the mall or at the end of a lonely dirt road? You might have signs made, put a display in your window, and put locks on the doors so you can protect your merchandise when you’re closed. If you’re going to operate a business online, the same rules apply. You can’t expect Google to do all the work of running your business for you.
From a technical perspective, you want to make sure your site is secure, that the database communicates with the application correctly, and that visitors can pull it up on Internet Explorer or Firefox, Windows or Mac. You also want to make sure it can be crawled and indexed effectively. (This technical side of SEO is what the upcoming O’Reilly Found conference I’m cochairing is all about.)
From a marketing perspective, you want to make sure that you’re using the language of your customer and have what your customers are looking for. That just makes good business sense.
So what about Dvorak’s specific claims?
Inability to identify a home site: Dvorak says search engines are “laughably” poor at returning home pages for navigational searches. He uses [art jenkins] as his example. As Danny points out on Sphinn, artjenkins.com is a parked site, so it probably isn’t the best result for that query. As this is his only example, I’m not sure what more to say about this. I know that I don’t want the similarly parked vanessafox.com to be the first result for a search of my name.
I’ve rarely come across this problem as a searcher, although I have seen it when sites completely block search engines or create sites entirely in Flash with no title tag, description, or text, so that it’s impossible for a search engine to know what the site’s about. Maybe search engines should somehow know without any clues like a name on the page, and certainly they use all the clues they can get, but there’s only so much you can do with a cryptic domain name and a title tag that says “welcome”.
Too much commerce: I actually find this to be an interesting accusation, because I think Google works very hard to provide non-commercial results for queries that don’t have obvious commercial intent. In fact, that’s caused many people to complain the other direction and say that Google includes too many Wikipedia-type research sites in its results. And based on my experience working in Google search, I can say that his assertion that “there seems to be an underlying belief, especially at Google, that the only reason you go online is to buy something” is definitely not the case.
He then uses this example: “Ask Google to find you a site that honestly compares cell-phone plans and tells you which is best. Try it! All you get are thousands of sites with fake comparisons promoting something they are selling.” In that case, the searcher is looking to buy something. They want a cell phone plan. And in this case, there’s an additional complication. How many sites are out there that provide information like cell phone plan comparisons that aren’t selling something?
Sites like consumerreports.corg password-protect much of this information because they too are looking to sell something — their content — and content behind a login isn’t going to show up in Google. (And with good reason. I imagine Dvorak would be just as upset to get search results for something that he couldn’t actually access without paying for.)
Google can only return results from sites that exist. It can’t created the magic fairy land that Dvorak dreams about where non-commercial sites provide endless comparison information simply for the joy of it. That said the query [what's the best cell phone plan] does return a lot of non-commercial results in the top ten, including askville.amazon.com, ask.metafilter.com, reviews.cnet.com, and answers.yahoo.com.
He then says:
What’s particularly bad about this is that the few honest sites trying to present information without SEO and all the trickery needed to get attention are put out of business; nobody ever finds those sites.
But as he noted in the opening of his article, SEO and trickery are two different things. And that’s like saying what’s particularly bad about capitalism is that companies who are good at marketing and product strategy and audience analysis and hiring and managing people succeed and the ones that are bad at it go out of business.
Parked sites ranking highly: This one is also perplexing. I just don’t see that many parked sites in my results. Sure some spam gets through, but it’s almost always temporary. Google and the other search engines have whole teams devoted entirely to fighting spam. It’s not as though they don’t know spam is an issue. To ask “How does page ranking, if it works, ever manage to give these bogus sites a high number?” just shows naivitee about how search engines work. Spammers try to find loopholes; engineers work to close them. There’s big money in spam so spammers do all kinds of clever things that Dvorak probably has never thought of to make those non-content sites appear, for a time, to be relevant.
Unrepeatable search results: He claims that you can never find these twice because the search results are always vastly different. I never find this to be the case. Danny suggests in the Sphinn thread that he may just not remember the exact search he was doing.
Suggestions for improvement?
He says, “the basis for Google page-ranking is to equate popularity with quality”. I know a lot of people have this view, but PageRank is one of only hundreds of signals that Google uses today. And they’re always experimenting with how to tweak those signals and add new ones to produce the best results possible. He suggests “rethinking the basic organization of the web itself” except that Google doesn’t have any control over how the web is organized. It just does the best it can with what it has to work with.
He concludes the article by saying “Hopefully, someone will conceptualize something new that works better than what we have today. The situation is just deteriorating too fast.” Really? I just don’t hear a lot of people talking about how much Google search results suck. Do you?
He also advocates old-school community-based directories:
“Yahoo! had a good idea when its search engine was actually a directory with segments “owned” by communities of experts.”
Well, he could try Mahalo. Although their expert-owned cell phone plans page could use a little work.
Google and the other major search engines are working all the time to improve results they provide. They have lots of smart people, are crunching lots of data, and doing all kinds of experiments. And while I mentioned earlier that their main aim is to make their search results as relevant as possible, they do, of course, reach out to site owners, and make information about search-friendliness available to everyone, not just SEOs.
Dvorak seems irritated that SEO is “all anyone working with web sites ever talks about nowadays”, and I think that’s only going to increase as SEO become mainstream fundamental aspects of development and marketing. We’re a searching culture, so businesses need to know how to get in front of searchers. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Give Him hell Vanessa