Comments on: Life, the Universe, and SEO

By: Life, the Universe, and SEO Revisited

Life, the Universe, and SEO Revisited — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 19:47:06 +0000

[...] couple of years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Life, the Universe, and SEO” in which I considered Google’s relationship with the search engine optimization (SEO) [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 03:52:07 +0000

Jack, that’s a good point. And it’s unrealistic for search engines to take on the full responsibility of converting database-backed sites or AJAX web applications into indexable documents (though the “indexing the deep web” meme never seems to die).

In any case, you reinforce the fact that SEO today is necessary, even for sites want nothing more than to honestly communicate their content to search engines. But that necessity in turn reinforces my frustration that the indexing process is part of an adversarial game.

By: Jack Walter

Jack Walter — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:52:52 +0000

Often lost in the SEO discussion is the notion that much of web search (spiders, PageRank, etc.) was originally built around traditional web concepts. Documents, hyperlinks, etc. But once web sites started being replaced with web applications, and then those application started being replaced with RIAs, well now you have an interesting challenge. You still want to provide the best experience possible to your end users, but you also need to provide what basically amounts to static “shadow” content for page catalogs like Google. It’ll be interesting to watch how web search content acquisition strategies evolve (or don’t) to account for this. But in the mean time, web search can impose a pretty hefty tax on web application design.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:15:02 +0000

True, but I’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t breaching the Chinese Wall between organic and sponsored results, and in particular that they aren’t sabotaging their organic results in order to increase the demand for sponsored ones.

And, as I said, SEO is necessary today, so I’m not trying to take away your livelihood. But the adversarial and opaque aspects of SEO are artifacts of Google’s (and, to be fair all the major web search engines’) black box approach to relevance. It would be more efficient for sites to compete for attention on a transparent and level playing field.

By: SEO Consultants

SEO Consultants — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 02:02:21 +0000

Lets not forget that Google’s Revenue comes from PPC, not from providing “the most relevant results”. With that said, SEO is very important, to make the true relevancy of a site visible, and fundamentally any site could benefit from it. SEO in itself is not bad, is the way that its applied that defines its nature, and wether is helping you, your visitor, or both.

By: seo news | SEO Blog

seo news | SEO Blog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 00:44:17 +0000

[...] Life, the Universe, and SEO | The Noisy Channel [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:41:29 +0000

I think that SEO matters most for sites in a highly competitive space, e.g., retailers competing to sell the same products. To a lesser extent, publishers (especially those focused on current events) compete to tell the same stories. A related factor that raises the important of SEO is the need to promote deep content from sites with a large number of pages.

Twitter doesn’t meet the above criteria. It doesn’t have direct competitors, unless you count Facebook and LinkedIn. And I doubt that most folks discover Twitter through serendipitous search results, so I don’t see Twitter trying to promote the deep content of update logs.

Better examples to make your case are Youtube and Wikipedia. But they are also exceptional. I don’t know if Youtube ever did any SEO, but now they are inside the Googleverse, they presumably don’t have to. And, even through Google doesn’t own Wikipedia, I suspect the Google actually favors Wikipedia content, whether explicitly or implicitly by how they’ve tuned their ranking algorithms.

All in all, it seems that SEO is a must-have for most competitive retailers and publishers.

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:09:50 +0000

I think it is fine to offer white-hat SEO services. Quite fine. In fact, it is just in line with a long tradition in Information Retrieval…

This being said… You will find a lot of highly popular sites that do not use any SEO trick. They rank highly because they have a lot of users or offer a service people really need. Twitter comes to mind.

Would I pay for SEO services? Absolutely. I wish my university would! However, the benefits might not be overly large.