Looking for Spam? Search for Something on Google (and Blame SEO)
All search engine use a certain formula to rank a web page and to associate. Te be efficient, the search engine team must do everything in its power to keep that formula secret so that search results reflect the true ranking of a page. But even when all precautions are taken, the search algorithm can be ‘reverse-engineered’ to a degree enough so that someone could tweak a web page to get a better ranking than pages that are not tweaked. This is the SEO’s job. When a horde of SEO experts use their know-how to force their content to a search engine, the initial formula used by the search engine is no good for giving the true ranking of web pages anymore. That formula becomes good only for ranking spam! You probably wonder why I use the term spam?
SEO is an inbound marketing technique used by marketers to drive qualified traffic to websites in order to promote a product or boost sales. Therefore, the message that is contained in a SEOed web page has a promotional intent. Now when people search on Google, they are not looking for advertising; they are looking for real stuff. But because of the horde of SEO professionals that have taken over the search engine with their promotional content, users will have to filter through Google’s results to identify and avoid promotional stuff which can sometimes be skilfully disguised as real stuff. In other words, because of SEO, using Google is pretty much like using a paid advertising search engine, only marketers had to pay an SEO professional instead of paying Google directly! This is why I call it spam.
Lets not forget that Google is first and foremost a huge advertising agency. Historically, it has provided great search results, but with the widespread use of SEO techniques by marketers, I fear its search results will become decreasingly relevant. Soon, a big advertising channel is all that will be left of the great search engine. It’s like a TV channel that offers 24/7 advertising, only you’ll have to do an extra effort of look for ads!
Good points, but I think SEO pros are doing a real service helping to clarify what is and is not important with respect to how people search for data. It’s like we’re working together with the search engine companies to give birth to a beautiful baby, a global intelligence of sorts. Keep pushing forward…never mind that the front page looks right now like a huge Amazon ad…it will change with time, and evolve. It’s good. I’m working in SEO trying to move it all forward.
Major questions:
How do you drive traffic to a site? How do you get traffic to a site when a 10 year old can build something as beautiful as the NY Times website in a week? And probably put together more interesting content too! Content is important, but to what extent? What would your algorithm use for search factors? Keywords (density to an extent), relevant words in the subject, links from other relevant sites in the same niche…could go on.
This could lead to an interesting conversation.