

Is SEO actually detrimental to the web? - rebooter

SEO is driving site and web structure and limiting how some aspects of what is on the web actually evolves.  URL's are now sentences.  In an effort to satisfy the SEO (mostly Google) gods everything is looking the same.<p>Is this good in the long run?<p>Your thoughts?
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garrettgillas
This is a really old conversation and it has steadily become less and less
relevant over the past 5 years. The most effective SEO practices these days
involve off-page and off site linking and on-page optimization is gets
slightly less and less effective every year. Tricks like keyword stuffing
URLs, title attributing everything, and no-follow sculpting, which used to
actually make a difference at one point in time, essentially make no
difference these days. For most SEO aware web developers these days, SEO is
more and more about accessibility and usability, as it should be.

The most effective tricks these days mostly involve passing as much link juice
to the site as possible, and matching it to good content that is based on
sound keyword research and user demand. In order to do this in such a way that
actually makes a significant difference in ranking without being penalized is
usually beyond the the average developer "dabbling" in SEO. The blackhat term
for this is "link laundering" and it's really the only way to get the huge
traffic gains in a reliable and sustained manner. Most SEO companies fit into
one of the 3 following types:

1\. Basic SEO is getting easier to execute with all the hand-holding that
Google gives out to webmasters these days, however the benefits are minimal.
Most of that realm is about making sure you're not screwing up your content,
rather than optimizing it. The kinds of gains you get by doing this are maybe
a 30% increase in traffic, assuming you site is not screwed up to begin with.

2\. On the other hand, using link laundering/pyramids even less talented SEOs
can see somewhere in the area of a 400% increase in traffic without much risk
of a penalty. This is a lot trickier though because imitating a strong,
natural, niche link graph is a lot harder than most people think.

3\. The last strategy is commonly referred to as "turn and burn". This
basically involves taking whatever content you have and link spamming the hell
out of it which will cause it's traffic to spike briefly before being banned
from Google's index. Ever seen all those spammy comments in you blogs that are
pointing to a really crappy landing page? This is what they are doing.

Now granted I've made a lot of generalities here. Most of the time I see
people discussing this topic they seem to not understand what SEO is compared
to what it was 7 years ago which is why I'm taking the time here to explain
this. The rules change a little when you start out with a valuable asset such
as a large quantity of good content (such as any of the Q&A sites), or a set
of very high quality links (anyone that's been covered by the major news
outlets) because you can base your strategy on getting the most out of those
assets.

Anyway, now that I've gone off on that tangent the easy answer is yes, good
SEO is good for the web because it makes content more usable and accessible,
and bad SEO is bad for the web because it means more spam.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
I think his question was whether SEO overall, rather than the good or bad part
of it, are good for the web.

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tomstuart
Argument against: "search engine optimisation" is about optimising web sites
for machines, not for people.

Argument for: the function of those machines is to help people, so a)
optimising for the machines is indirectly beneficial to people because they're
happier when the machines work better, and b) as the machines get better at
understanding what's good for people, optimising for the machines becomes more
directly beneficial to people because they both "want" the same thing.

The web would be better if everyone simultaneously stopped doing SEO and
started thinking about people directly instead of indirectly via Google's
ranking algorithms, but now that the arms race is in full effect and there are
a million parasites making a living from it, the best case scenario is for
Google to continue to close the gap between "good for machines" and "good for
people" so that the satisfaction of the SEO gods translates as completely as
possible into the satisfaction of human users.

~~~
gridspy
"Thinking about people directly" misses the benefit of an objective, well-
defined third-party evaluation (i.e googlebot).

If you think about "people" directly, I would imagine that those people, in
your mind, all browse the web with your web browser, in your OS, with your
abilities. These people all find content the same way you do.

Of course, we both know that many people do not browse the web in IE8, just as
many do not browse the web in Windows at all. A great number (but perhaps a
tiny percentage) don't have flash.

Having a nice objective measure of what makes a page accessible is a very
useful thing for a web developer.

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patio11
I do not mind living on an Internet where blog post links last beyond the next
update, URLs hint at content, StackOverflow crushes archived mailing lists on
programming questions, the top result for "biology bingo" is not a blank page
(it was in 2006), and content is created for demographics which are not
content creators themselves. Hug a SEO, they're half the reason Google works
these days (particularly at the fringes where the link graph is sparse and
hence classic PageRank isn't oracular).

~~~
Encosia
I agree with you overall, but we've also got eFreedom.com beating
StackOverflow with duplicate content in some cases, purely through SEO. In a
perfect world, it would be impossible for someone to take StackOverflow's CC
data dump and then outrank them.

~~~
jhrobert
Do search engines actually try to "de duplicate" such content?

Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged?

What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or
is this another "tragedy of the common"?

In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?

~~~
garrettgillas
To questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes. The only real way for most people to
fight back is to report them to google:
<https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1>

~~~
rhizome
Unfortunately, unless someone has some inside dirt on their contracts,
unrepentant content-dupers like efreedom, nabble, osdir, mail-archive, etc are
not able to be dealt with through that form.

I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom
having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their
users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each
search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently
falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.

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nitrogen
White-hat SEO, or providing genuinely good content that's easy for both humans
and algorithms to parse, complete site maps, etc. is unquestionably good.
Gray- or black-hat SEO, which results in ad-spammed content farms reaching the
top results when there are much better sources (in many cases sources which
were scraped by the SEO sites without proper credit) is destroying the web.
SEO agencies posting dozens of generated blogs to bury negative reviews of
themselves are definitely evil.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
In the end, they both play by certain rules, that is the algorithm, which
rewards or penalises a certain behaviour. Nothing to say about the penalty,
but the rewarding part, in both cases, simply leads to a gain not due to merit
but due to technicality.

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duskwuff
Depends on what kind of SEO you mean. I've seen both ends of the spectrum --
some "SEO" is just good web practices codified, some "SEO" is just a code word
for content spamming.

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albahk
If blackhats were not using SEO to game Search engine results and rankings,
they would be using some other method to game other systems like webrings
(remember those?), website directories or just good old email spam.

Silver lining: SEO rules are mandated by a Tech company like Google who can
push an agenda for better web-standards.

The problem is the people that do black-hat SEO, they will always be around
screwing things up for others through scamming and spamming.

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Yaggo
> URL's are now sentences.

Which is still better than
[http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQI...](http://example.com/portal/servepage.asp?state=URHDA43FIDNWQIWD42UEFVE)
(add 100+ chars) type of URLs we used to have before the SEO era.

Most SEO is nothing more than basic web concepts implemented right. People
benefits from that, too.

~~~
user24
fuck, sorry I downvoted you when I meant to upvote. Can someone _please_
implement an undo vote feature!?!? Also upvote Yaggo because he doesn't
deserve to be on 0 points.

~~~
Yaggo
Happened to me, too, blame the 10x10 pixel icons.

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iuguy
The long tail theory for URLs (i.e. where URLs make sense), combined with
doing half of Google's job for them (i.e. making your pages index easier and
in a more relevant manner) is nothing but pure gravy for the Internet. The
gaming, the spam blogs, the autoposted crap of the world are scum, but it's an
ongoing game of cat and mouse between google and the blackhat SEOs.

Personally I like the fact that someone can search for something rather
specific and find something that's relevant, as opposed to the traditional
mid-90s method of using 4 or 5 different search engines and 3 or 4 directories
to hopefully find what you want.

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pierrefar
Real, SEO valuable in the long-term, is nothing more than another marketing
channel. Saying SEO is bad for the web is much like saying leaflets you get in
the mail are bad. As with everything marketing, there are good
people/companies who get their message across without being sleazy or spammy,
and then there are sleazeballs.

IMHO, Google had a few settings wrong (call them "bugs" if you want) in early
2000s which many techies capitalised on. It's no different than finding a
loophole in the finance industry regulation and trying to get away with it. In
the case of Google's bugs, Google eventually reacted and became much more
stringent. Sadly, by then the reputation damage to SEO has been done.

As for sentences for URLs, I agree with you. There is a fine balance between
saying domain.com/widgets/green and domain.com/buy-new-and-used-widgets-green
. I always ask which one would you rather speak over the phone, and that gets
the point across.

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davidw
It seems like something of a zero sum game to me, since they're competing for
rankings, rather than, IMO, creating much actual value. Once you've taken care
of the basics that Google mentions on their site, more effort is just an "arms
race" in some ways.

~~~
rebooter
And maybe it is this "arms race" issue that is at the core of the SEO problem.
If you are a startup with SEO that just happens to intersect with that of a
very large well-established organization you might as well not exist.

Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of
top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".

Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and
relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.

Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If
you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site
for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue
you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond
frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with
Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks
who had sites black listed by them.

If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a
doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think
that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.

I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some
aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they
undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.

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pornel
White-hat SEO helps accessibility.

When client asks "can't we just Flashajax the hell out of it?" they won't
listen to response that it won't be accessible, standards-compliant, etc. But
they do listen to "No, Googlebot won't index it".

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gaius
It has been detrimental as soon as a suit heard about the <META> tag some time
in the 90s. Then you had I dunno, a site selling lawnmowers with "ANNA
KOURNIKOVA NEKKID" in its HTML and it was all downhill from there.

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lurchpop
Why doesn't HN use those sentence urls?

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robwgibbons
Good SEO is about making your content as easy as possible to index, using
semantically meaningful markup and keywords. Bad SEO is about using convoluted
tricks to game search engines.

Good SEO is good for the Web, bad SEO is bad for the Web.

