Originally, Google developed algorithms that were meant to reflect the relevance of a HTML page to a user seeking information. In times when people were not SEO-aware yet, a page that ranked high in search results did so because it’s content deserved it. Hence, page rank really meant that: A rank for that page’s content.
Things have changed since…
What SEO is effectively trying is to outsmart (or cheat, if you want) the system by implementing “clever” linking structures and using smart-assed wording in content (often refereed to as “keyword density”).1
Consequently, page rank is increasingly becoming a measure of how good at SEO whoever assigned to that job was. What that means to YOU, as an Internet user, is that the pages you are served first are not necessarily the pages you would have wanted to find.
Am I saying SEO is superfluous inanity?
Well, obviously it is something you can’t get away without anymore. It seems if you don’t do SEO, but everybody else does, you are screwed. Now that’s a hell of an argument, isn’t it? It kinda reminds me of a similar shortsighted reasoning with mass destruction weapons: If you don’t have mass destruction weapons, but everybody else does, you are screwed. Absolutely.
But do mass destruction weapons make this a better world to live in?
Nope.
The same is true about SEO.
- Welcome To The Machine (Or 8 Easy Steps To Nowhere)
- Obama's SEO Counterstrike
- Is SEO Mass Internet Destruction?
- SEO Page Rank Sculpting My Ass – Nofollow Meta Game Over
- Which is why Google are revising their ranking scheme every now and then – to compensate against inadequate page rank consumption. [↩]
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:22 am
I agree wholeheartedly with this article.
SEO is ruining real content-rich websites that don’t optimize their page title or header tags.
One of my pet peeves is delving through search results that just duplicate their keywords for the page title and page description.
It doesn’t tell me what I want to know.
—
And also I hate going through websites that have keyword-stuffed anchor text on every sentence or in every menu navigational link!
One thing you can always expect from our species is the ability to exploit an idea when the the original intention was for the good. eg. invention of nuclear power gave rise to nuclear weapons, etc.
January 12th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I agree also. It’s a never ending story to find creativity ideas for writing them, and you except that “google” will appreciate unique articles by ranking them appropriately. BUT, they are wasting our ideas by looking on links between mega portals that cost millions that are promoted on TV, while your genuine ideas goes last on the search.
And then you have to either pay an “SEO” master or Spend more time on the internet trying to put a link here and there.
Also, Google announced a Change in their algorithm-they “mention” that a big factor of the ranking is calculated due to the users, which mean the more access you have the higher you get,But then again, how can i fight financed portals?
February 11th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
SEO-driven results are a new form of spam. I wish Google would rank those pages (and content-mill sites like associatedcontent, demandstudios, etc) LOWER because there is usually no info on those pages, just repetition of keywords.
February 14th, 2010 at 12:45 pm
I’ve been increasingly getting “WordPress-related” search results that got me to pages that are a mere aggregation of one line summaries of blog posts taken from announcements on twitter and co. These sites obviously rank better for (some) WordPress-related keywords than the blogs they are referring to. That’s pretty ridiculous, but shows how ridiculous the whole SEO thing can get. That said, it is not Google, but human nature that takes SEO (and everything else) to perversion – that omnipresent element in human nature to “beat the system” by first learning than circumventing the system’s rules.