A lot of what is labeled and sold as "SEO" might as well be diet fraud. Plagiarism, false advertising, astroturfing, etc. It certainly isn't just letting the Google bot know what your website is about.
I agree, though I think it's fair play to try and do things that the Google algorithm likes...but are not directly related to quality.
Say somewhere in the bowels of their ML pipelines, features that get scored include things like "has a favicon.ico and it's unique and not seen elsewhere". Well, then doing that isn't really fraud to me. It's just adding "proxies for quality" so you aren't dinged for not having them.
Ummm, this is SEO? Because it is a hack from google's algo? This is exactly my problem with the "hackers" here and the article's author - conflating the action with content. He finds an unscroupolous usage of that hack and generalizes without any effort that all of it is fraud.
It is not okay to glide over the 'young people' part and generally not being empathetic to those trying to beat the market. If it is fraud, which is a crime, are you suggesting these people should be sent to jail? Because if not then you shouldn't use the that word. Words have meaning.
I would love to have a way to punish people for submitting knownlingly bad information to publicly editable databases like IMDB (note I don't care about Google, it is IMDB that should be protected)
Jail is too much, but it woukd be nice to have a fine of some sort, because "poisining the well" for everyone is really not cool.
(in practice any such system would be abused a lot, so we are probably better off with status quo.. but in the ideal world we'd punish those people)
Public service, if you think jail is too much. An hour for each word of the falsehood, 1000 hours for each picture included.
Poisoning the well is a deeply antisocial act, and just because it isn't the literal town water well, but is instead the common information well, doesn't make it less of an 'eff-you-all' act.
Right. We can achieve heaven if we just punish every sin. Not trusting almighty Google's algorithm is just too much sacrifice the good people are making.
Promoting publicly editable database as authoritative is high bar we must achieve at the cost of just banning juvenile behavior.
No, "we can reduce reduce bad behavior if we punish for it". This stuff actually works -- if we don't punishing bad behavior, we get more and more of it over time (which is kinda what happened with internet)
I am not sure why you keep bringing up Google here -- no one cares about it, it is megacorp and it can take care of itself. We want to protect entities like IMDB and Wikipedia. It does not matter why it was vandalized (and that's what happened here) -- to fool Google, or to impress friends, or to get to backstage -- it was bad, and it should not be encouraged.
And finally, learning that actions have responsibilities is an important part of the growing up. I certainly got some parking tickets when I was younger and it taught me an important lesson. (Of course the punishment should not be excessive, nothing that stays on your record for the whole life).
Dude. This is not public database. This is for profit multi-billion dollara corporations spending more money on marketing than security and selling a product which promises notability based on publicly editable no-oversight database.
You defending thia is really just telling more about you. Amazon sits on a domain called "international" movie database where they don't have anyone to verify the biggest block-busters of the biggest movie makers in the world. With your logic you should be out on the streets demanding criminal proceedings against this "fraud".
Nothing else for me to say. Vote me down all you want.
