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Saturday, August 7, 2010

is SEO killing search engines ?

John Dvorak seems to be convinced that Google, Bing, and their likes have lost the current battles with SEO techniques.

He claims that techniques which are used to make a webpage, more popular, for advertising purposes, have overcome the search engines smart algorithms, and more and more surfers find themsevles reaching unpleasant pages, crowded with lots of commercials and little content.

The techniques he refers to, are such as finding bizzare reasons to add sexy content, such as celebrity names, and keywords that have a high probablity to appear in user queries. an example for that would be a page with the following astrological-informaton:
Did you know that Barak Obama's astrological sign is a Leo ?
And Did you know that Britney Spears is a Sagittarius ?
That Michael Jackson was a virgo ?
3 simple questions, have created a seemingly innocent page, with not-so-bad external links, which should come quite high in web-searches, due to the imprinting of those so-popular names...  
 
Personally, I haven't experienced a decline in my ability to find good content on the web. And I really doubt that this post will become more popular because of my venerable guests... after all, this post isn't about porn, it does not deal with sex, it does not contain images, and it sure doesn't mention really important search terms of the last year, like iphone or smartphones... oops. now it does (:
 
More seriously: it is clear that SEO and Engines are in an ever-lasting battle. it is clear that our interest as surfers is that engines win. What caught my eye was Dvorak's suggestion to add into the engines a rating device based on the percentage of content compared with the percentage of advertising. I was sure this is already done. Isn't the first thing a smart algorith does is check the content ?

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