Tuesday, November 13, 2007

SEO is the new spam. Actually, it's worse!

SEO is the new spam. Actually, it's worse.

It's worse because if I receive some god-awful missive about penile disfunction via email I can simply delete, block sender etc. It is annoying because I've been broadcast at.

SEO is worse because it targets me and makes me part of its deception. I perform the act that brings the spam to me when I enter my search terms.

It's another example of what I call pseudo engagement.

How so? If I mention the I-phone on this blog (apologies I-phone wannabees...) I will receive a certain number of additional visits to this article from people who are interested in the I-phone - not on my tirade against SEO!

So SEO helped you find what you wanted, how exactly?

SEO of the machine kind may deliver increased traffic but if it's gathered in a mercenary 'acquire-at-all-costs' way it's really just a poor man's broadcast - another way of acquiring eyeballs that just aren't interested.

The engines need some human help - community advice, ratings etc. I know what I want. The search engine doesn't.

Irony: I tried searching for this article to reference in this post. I used almost the exact title of it "google doesn't know what you're looking for". It took me three search attempts on google and on this blog's google-powered search! Only when I changed the term 'you're' to 'you are' did I find it.

How does your SEO fit? How fit is your SEO?

3 comments:

  1. Erm.

    You appear to be painting both 'white hat' and 'black hat' SEO with the same brush.

    The 'white hat' approach to SEO is simply producing copy and tags etc which, when indexed by Google, make it easier to find the copy by those people who want to find it.

    And most of the methods for SEO'ing content in an ethical way are all human generated, such as the original copy structure and adding meta tags etc.

    The alternative would be something like Mahalo, which has it's own limitations...

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  2. Seems to me the same rules apply to any tag? Tags, like anything else, only have meaning if given context.
    eg 'bike'
    What do I mean? Bicycle, motorcycle, woman of easy virtue?
    You need some context to make sense of that tag.
    How does search do context?
    Perhaps communities could assist? And we're back to google's social search ideas.

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  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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