Slander? No way. I think you mean libel, right? Besides, no libel that I can see since it has to be something written that is totally false. I don’t see anything written like that.

I see this thread as a good discussion with good points on both sides.

http://teddziuba.com/2008/09/a-web-os-are-you-dense.html

Btw I think it was bit unfair to have all 3 of you ganging up on Vanessa

First of all, Phil’s comment on slandering a professional. That would be removed if I were moderating this site.

My take on SEO:

As you mentioned,
“It’s not Google’s responsibility to make sure your customers can find you”

I would have agreed if Google were Alexa 560 site, with half a million visitors daily. But it’s not. Google is so popular that too many people use it for their means. So, it is naturally their responsibility partially to rank useful resources high. In that end, giving too much importance to SEO and links only causes spammers to rise high in search results. But as you say, Google just fights from their end to improve the web.

I would have loved it if it had been a world without SEO. Or at least, google shouldn’t popularize the exact way they are ranking sites. That will at least cause confusion in spammers.

Secondly, I have been seeing lot more spam in Google search results for a few days. I believe they should really do something about it. I have some recommendations you people may wish to check out here: http://cutewriting.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-web-spam-seo-ranking.html

About slandering comments: Vanessa, please delete them.

Anyone know what title of that blog post is? I can’t seem to find it.

Thanks!

I can remember the days before anybody could… google. As you can see in my pseud, I know what it’s like to work in a revolutionary corporation whose product is so incredible, unique and universe dominant that it became a verb. Now what?

I think of Google as the first broadcast network of the web. It doesn’t change the fact that there are still people on the planet that do things the old way, and I think anyone who thinks about it seriously knows that the old way still works. If ‘the only way your business can reach people’ is through Google, then you basically don’t have a real business. Google is the Yenta for ugly businesses and the great unwashed public. Other people who have a clue about something know where to look. Or is del.icio.us now completely obsolete because it’s too difficult to use?

The problem here is what people like me understand. I get paid to build very secure financial reporting systems – the kind of stuff that almost never goes public and when it does, people get sued, sometimes. Generic search is never going to lead to wisdom, it’s returning facts, maybe even knowledge but it’s angling towards data. GIGO.

Page Rank is not wrong. It’s what the broad, general, business angling great unwashed public market wants, and you get what you pay for.

SEO isn’t an exercise in helping the search engines not suck. SEO is:
-understanding we’re in a searching culture and if you can’t be found in search, then you don’t exist to a large percentage of your potential audience.
-businesses who operate online need to understand how to create search-friendly web sites the same way they need to understand security if they process credit cards.

Yes, search engines aren’t perfect and I’m not an apologist for them. But I’m not saying “heck of a job, Brownie.” I’m saying that the things you are calling them out for is old news. They know about these issues and their smartest PhDs are working on them. I talk to startup search engines every day. They all say Google sucks. They all say they can do better. But it turns out the building a relevant, useful search engine isn’t as easy as it looks.

Until we have a better system, businesses and anyone else who wants to attract an audience online needs to understand how to integrate SEO into their businesses or they will never enjoy the level of success that they otherwise could.

Never encountered unrepeatable searches? Parked sites at the top of a search result? And you claim to be a tech journalist — or whatever it is you call yourself? Come on. You must really be in a “fairyland”.

“[A]nd in their defense, they’ve got lots of people working on it, all the time” — Awwww, isn’t that sweet. They’ve got people working on it. Yet at the same time they position themselves in the public mind as the center of gravity on the internet, the “observer” that essentially gives the internet its form by presenting it in a navigable form to web users. So on one hand, in the concrete and tangible realm, they make the websurfing experience suffer by providing crappy search results (note: ‘better than the others’ still doesn’t mean good). On the other hand *they try real hard* and have all sorts of institutional mechanisms in place to poorly combat the noise threatening to overwhelm the signal.

It’s no secret that with Google Desktop, the advent of cloud computing, and so on, Google is trying to be more than just a friendly, neutral search engine. It’s trying to take the point of interface away from the OS to Internet-as-Google/Google-as-Internet. Any discussion of its relative success providing search results a la SEO and other methods has to occur in this light. People like Vanessa, and Phil the crackpot above, seem surprisingly like a bunch of reactionaries with their “Heck of a job, Brownie” Google-friendly views.

The resaon that he couldn’t find a decent cell phone site is that the USA has a third world mobile infrastruture

First of all, let’s be clear that, not so long ago, idiots like this would not have had the luxury of complaining about matters like this. Google REVOLUTIONIZED the internet, and the only reason people like him can dream about their Utopian internet universes is because Google has brought us to this point.

Go back in time just a few years ago and think about what a searcher would have found for some of these searches on Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Dogpile… need I go on?

Parked sites ranked highly? Please! I can honestly say in my ENTIRE LIFE, I have never stumbled upon a parked site via a Google search, in lieu of something else I was looking for.

The bias towards commerce sites? Please!!!! Google is WELL known for its information bias. Like you so correctly point out, Google can’t help it if the only people writing about the “[insert "best" product here] are trying to make money off the sale of that product.

Perhaps Mr. Altruism over there should devote his life to creating top quality informational sites for some of these commercial topics for the sole purpose of increasing the quality of Google search results.

Utterly absurd. Google is the best thing to happen to the world since blow jobs. Yes, SEO has been wildly out of control in the last decade – the internet is basically the new “Wild West” of the modern era. But Google is the new sheriff in town, and they have been incredibly effective at weeding out spam tactics – more so every year.

Yes, there could be better than Google – and most likely, they will be beaten by someone better – themselves, next year. And the year after that.

This guy is nothing more than the typical anarchist type who can do nothing other than try to tear down a good system without proposing a viable alternative. I hate people like that.

Sorry for the long post, but it was therapeutic.