| SEO? |
| I've got better things to do. |
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33% |
[ 1 ] |
| Who cares as long as I get my rank! |
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0% |
[ 0 ] |
| I try to wear the white hat. |
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66% |
[ 2 ] |
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| Total Votes : 3 |
Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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| SEO can be cancerous! |
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We need to stop putting our own interests above the quality of the public information pool.
SEO is the very practice of artificially affecting search engines. Instead of letting the search engines design work as intended, we structure our layouts and even our content in order to "fool" the index.
The parts of SEO that happen to be just good practice already have a name: "Good Practice". These should be done independently from any SEO campaign.
The other aspects of SEO are equivalent to SPAM, just over a different protocol. Opportunism, in any form, decreases the value of its medium.
I'm no hippie quaker stressing an unreasonable standard of ethics here. Link freely. I understand that there's a certain amount of shitfuckery that's just going to happen in a feral environment like today's internet. I think of it like natural selection in microcosm. One day another google will evolve that not susceptible to the same exploits. And so on.
But let's not fool ourselves. The moment an SEO campaign reaches outside of its site, it becomes cancerous to the quality of information on the net.
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Thu Sep 02, 2004 4:31 pm
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Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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| Need proof? |
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I'll give an example here.
I'm in the process of designing and implementing a distributed web content management system in PHP. In the process of performance optimization, I now face the question: quote:
Can one achieve better performance having all the PHP code in one large script, or is it better to break it all up and include each file as needed?
So, of course, I go to google to see what people say about large,
single-file php scripts. I search google for largest php script. Seems like a reasonable search doesn't it?
If you follow the search I linked, you'll see that almost ALL of the hits are fake pages set up in someone's braindead SEO campaign. Just read the text - it reads like spam subject headers interspersed with search keywords.
a snippet:
quote:
Throughout but php script fecund cgi script installation usually you can get largest php script installation direct quickest including php script ostensibly.
Whew, was that ever helpful! Thanks SEO fux!
Now. I'm not whining. I don't mind a dead-end search. Happens alla time. What I'm doing is backing up this observation: The more we abuse the public information repository (the internet) for the sake of opportunism, the less valuable the repository will be.
I'll boil it right down to a soundbyte, because it really is this simple.
The moment you stop genuinely improving your content, features and structure and start "gaming" the system, you stop improving the quality of the internet and start destroying it. When you work on your website, you are doing one or the other. You cannot have it both ways.
Classic prisoner's dilemma here, folks. Who are you inside?
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Thu Sep 02, 2004 5:31 pm
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Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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The white SEO hat summarizes good website practice. It's not optimizing anything, technically speaking. It's just presenting your info on your site to the best of your abilities. That's good for you, good for your readers and good for the entire public information broadcasting system. That's not SEO, that's just good work.
The moment you start gaming the system, rearranging your content to please a robot, well, guess what, your audience is no longer human.
For SEOers, page rank obessession precedes boring old best-effort quality. The promise of a short cut redirects them from doing good work to doing anything from silly to malicious work.
Again, prisoners dilemma. Do you cooperate? Or compete?
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Thu Sep 02, 2004 6:07 pm
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Thermit
Site Admin
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 272
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I've rearranged content for the 'bot.
But, then moving your navigation column from one side of your content column to get the content higher up in the HTML isn't really going to hurt the human reader, and could help the human have a better chance of getting to that page via better search engine result ranking for that page.
I think most SEOers realize that they have two audiences, human and bot.
If the pages don't get ranked well, there aren't going to be too many people reading those pages. But if you take it too far, then no human would want to read them. That is the line I won't cross.
So, I still find no poll option that I could vote for.
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Thu Sep 02, 2004 6:49 pm
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Euler
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 109
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Actually I tried to have a third poll option that was middle ground, but only two stuck. And I don't see a way to edit the poll once in motion. Good thing too, you don't want people invalidating polls so easily.
I would like to be clear on a point: I'm not saying that everything done under the guise of SEO is bad.
I'm saying that all of the good aspects of SEO already had a name: "good webmasterin' ".
Also I'm trying to point out a very delicate line that gets crossed when angling for pagerank. I believe this line gets crossed, for example, when a webauthor writes content to attain a certain keyword ratio instead of writing to communicate a point to a reader to the best of his ability.
Just because nobody can measure your sincerity in text, doesn't mean sincerity is meaningless.
To be frank, this is an impractical stance to take. It is not the fast buck or the edge or anything like that. Also, nobody gives a shit. It doesn't keep me up nights either.
I just think that if you put the reader first, popularity will follow.
I know how pompous all that may sound. So imagine someone saying this without being pompous or judgemental about it and that's where I'm coming from.
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Thu Sep 02, 2004 7:59 pm
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All times are GMT. The time now is Sat May 19, 2012 9:11 am
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You might need a new poll option: "I try to wear the white hat"