Gad, I am so sick of SEO. Not Jacques article, but SEO in general.
Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes.
Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.
And I think it's unfair to call all these guys leeches, miscreants, or whatever. I don't like a lot of the things they do, but I also respect the fact that I live in a first world country. I have a good way of living. If I were terribly impoverished and only had to spam a lot to feed my family? I'd do it. We assume everybody else on the web lives the same lives that we do. We also are getting this quasi-religious thing going on where Google must return what I want at the top of the search results. If it does not, somebody has sinned. I'm not drinking that cool-aid.
I'm with Jacques on the solution: a new protocol and the elimination of single-points-of-failure. This thing where Google keeps updating it's algorithm and tens of thousands of people keep gaming the system has to stop. It's not healthy behavior either for Google or for the spammers. And it's destroying the web.
Sidebar: you know, if you think about it, with all the walled gardens and vendors refusing common protocols and such, the web itself is under attack from multiple angles.
Are we really worse off today than we were in 2001? Google isn't perfect, but spam and SEO existed before them. They've beaten it back pretty well in my opinion.
Can I get more detail about the "new protocol" solution? The only anti-spam protocol solution I've seen discussed is authenticated identity for every packet. So no more anonymity, but much better reputation/authority/trust. I'm not down with that. Got something else?
This is Jacques idea, but hell, I'm happy to speculate.
How about a double-blind authorship trust built into the http protocol? Put something like an anonymous secure PR inside the packets instead of sitting on top of the entire page transaction and being managed by one party.
That's plenty of hand-waving, I admit, but I think there's probably something there worth exploring.
As far as the "are we worse off" question, I'd love to show you my inbox and spam folder on my servers. The economics of this is driving us to the point where we are paying hundreds of thousands of intelligent people world-wide to spend their lives doing silly things so that Google can evolve its algorithm and we can have better search. Better for me, sure. Maybe you should talk to one of those guys who made enough to feed his family for a few months then lost it all on Panda.
> Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.
You should read this as shorthand for "build your business the traditional way and the users will come." Don't just count on ranking highly for a competitive query for your business to succeed. Build a brand and customers, and people will seek you out. You will have no difficulty ranking for [the name of your company] and this is where most good sites get most of their traffic from Google.
I'm a little baffled by the suggestions of a whole new protocol to fix this: it seems to me like there's a really easy solution.
Just say no to people who want to buy links, or votes, or ask you to take down links. Throw those e-mails in your spam folder.
I say this not as a Googler but as someone who struggled with boundary issues as a young adult, where people would ask me unreasonable things and I would comply or I would ask them unreasonable things and burden them. It is not your responsibility to feed someone else's family, unless, of course, you want to. It is not your responsibility to undo the link penalties that some spammer racked up with black-hat SEO, unless they're damaging your own site's reputation and you want to do something about it. It is not your responsibility to fix the web, unless, of course, you have a concrete improvement that you can convince people to try.
It is the SEO's job to find ways to add value without pissing people off. It is Google's job to keep their product useful enough in the face of people that want to abuse it that you keep using it. It's your job to make decisions that advance your interest without trampling on the interests of others.
BTW, Google's tried several attempts at verified authorship protocols, one of which I worked on:
They usually fail for lack of adoption. It's very difficult to get people to buy into a system that makes them do extra work for the general health of the ecosystem.
Also FWIW, if I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operates and having a huge leg up on the competition. Why? Because there are several hundred people inside Google changing the algorithm, and just me on the outside trying to adapt to the changes. I'm far better off aligning my incentives with Google, so that all the work they do benefits me. I'd do this by providing a compelling enough experience for users that they keep coming back and talk about the product on their own accord, not by trying to force them to talk about it. Then all of Google's evals, metrics, etc. would say that my site should be on top, and so they'll tweak the algorithm to adapt to me instead of me tweaking my site to adapt to the algorithm.
"If I were to leave Google and found a web business, I would spend very minimal time on SEO, despite knowing (in broad strokes) how the ranking algorithm operates and having a huge leg up on the competition."
This is a critical point and needs to be underscored. Chasing SEO from a technical perspective is a fool's game. I think SEO can inform your choice of person-to-person marketing activities, but can never take the place of them.
I agree with everything you've said, but I would add one thing: as the complexity of Google's algorithm increases, there's more and more collateral damage. So, for instance, I had a micro-site I made several years ago. Back then the thing to do was to make sure you tweaked your on-page content so that the search engines better understood it.
Flash forward to today. Now if you "over-tweak" (who knows what that means) you get penalized. The same goes for a dozen other topics. They used to either be best practices or work well. Now they're either considered bad practices and you get punished for them. It's completely unrealistic to expect that I am going to have time to go back and re-honk around with stuff because in the great search engine wars the rules change every year.
As far as the protocol thing goes, who knows? I think it's important to realize that we all have the power to do whatever we want on top of TCP-IP. Let a thousand new ideas bloom. See if any of them gain traction.
For the most part you won't be penalized for "over-tweaking" on your site. Keyword stuffing and hidden text were dealt with in the early 2000's. If you are targeting keywords in the page title, headers, and body of your site at a reasonable amount, you don't have to worry about "over-tweaking". You do have to worry about over the top link exchanges, buying links, selling links, and too much commercially targeted anchor text pointing at your site.
I can't believe I'm reading this, it's like a freakin' miracle. We've been fighting a battle about this for 2 weeks over at WMW. Nobody is listening, it's sick and maddening - it's made 10x worse by people screaming 'Google is evil' and dominating any intelligent thread about the subject.
For the love of all that is awesome on the internet. Webspam team - take a step back, listen to what engineers / webmasters / intelligent people are telling you - make some serious changes soon and fast.
Google owns the game. They run the game on a computer. Ergo, if you want people naturally coming from Google, you must do things its computer likes.
Only they won't tell you that. Instead, they'll offer platitudes like "write good content and the users will come" when we all know you could write great content until the cows come home and if nobody links to you, you ain't getting no traffic.
And I think it's unfair to call all these guys leeches, miscreants, or whatever. I don't like a lot of the things they do, but I also respect the fact that I live in a first world country. I have a good way of living. If I were terribly impoverished and only had to spam a lot to feed my family? I'd do it. We assume everybody else on the web lives the same lives that we do. We also are getting this quasi-religious thing going on where Google must return what I want at the top of the search results. If it does not, somebody has sinned. I'm not drinking that cool-aid.
I'm with Jacques on the solution: a new protocol and the elimination of single-points-of-failure. This thing where Google keeps updating it's algorithm and tens of thousands of people keep gaming the system has to stop. It's not healthy behavior either for Google or for the spammers. And it's destroying the web.
Sidebar: you know, if you think about it, with all the walled gardens and vendors refusing common protocols and such, the web itself is under attack from multiple angles.