Be gone!!
Lorelle is asking everyone what they want gone from the web. This could be quite difficult, but beside the obvious, spammers, IE6, table based layouts, Javascript widgets etc, there is one thing that I want to die. I want SEO gone.
There is a lot of nonsense talked about SEO; either it is evil, or simple, exploiting people, trampling over the honest site owners that don’t understand, commercialising the web, or any number of criticisms. I don’t give a damn about any of that; this is not why I want it gone; SEO, like any other industry, is simply meeting a need.
What I have a problem with is that the very existence of SEO is a side-effect of search engines that just don’t work well enough. This isn’t really a criticism of search engines either. What we have is better than we have ever had, but it just isn’t enough.
A search engine that can be affected by any deliberate strategy is not good enough. Search engines need to be able to determine quality, to report on fact instead of repetitive assertions, and to know what I am likely to be searching for. Personalisation takes a nice step, but just not enough.
Relevence by popularity is one aspect, but as we all know, popularity is a very poor indicator of actual quality or importance. We need a search engine that can judge the likelihood of something being authoritative, and know that being an expert in one thing does not make the author an expert on something else. We need the outright wrong answers filtered out, or at least sidelined (let’s not go into the arguments that what we know to be true could be controlled by Google).
We need so much more, but even a little more would invalidate SEO, and that would mean progress. A good thing in my book.
Lorelle comments:
What the commenter was really saying is that they want the Google Games gone. Unfortunately, the original context of search engine optimization has become a scheming game by many who claim get rick quick promises for your blog or website.
This, I’d love to see gone, too.
SEO is critical as it helps you understand what you are doing that might interfere with a search engine’s ability to index and “judge” your site, but the scams, cons, and games people promote are the sleazy side of the web and people are tired of it.
I’d love to see search engines improve on quality control and filtering out the unwanted, but the process of reporting splogs, scrapers, and copyright violators is slow, tedious, and, in many cases, involves printing out paper and mailing, something many who have grown up with computers find time-wasting and not worth the effort. Identifying and slapping splogs and scrapers is critical. This I hope to be improved in the next year or two.
18th December 2007 , 20:11
Andrew Rickmann comments:
Thanks Lorelle, I think ultimately I am looking towards a further future where nothing you can do to a page, besides making it a different page altogether, will get in the way of the engine understanding what the page really is.
I would settle for an end to the scheming though for the moment.
19th December 2007 , 00:10
Mark Sheldon comments:
What you need sir is a library! I think one has to accept that the Internet is free of editorial control and this allows a variety of literary talent to express themselves. The positive aspect is increasing freedom of speech.
In my experience of SEO a good business strategy will eventually result in good placement, mostly through consistency. I have yet to see any manipulative method actually improve things.
20th December 2007 , 20:06
Andrew Rickmann comments:
You may be right Mark, unfortunately the amount of money I owe to various libraries makes that a non-starter. I am awful at returning books.
If the manipulative methods don’t really improve things then that is all to the good. I have tended to take the same view, that good content is worth more than optimised content.
20th December 2007 , 21:06
Bobby comments:
Yes, SEO should be gone. I mean the mass hysteria re: page rank. It’s annoying and it’s probably led to more than a few folks naming their first-born Google, in honour of the search engine. :)
6th January 2008 , 10:42