Azelma wrote:
Aestu wrote:
You try to portray SEO as a competitive practice. It's not. SEO is inherently anti-competition, because it inherently favors weak products backed by established interests.
This is probably the dumbest thing you've ever said. It absolutely is a competitive practice. Ranking on the first page for competitive terms is a big deal. If everyone is trying to rank for something...they are in competition for it. If Samsung, Sony, and Dell...all want to rank on page 1 for the term "Tablet PC" - they are in direct competition. The one with the best SEO strategy will rank the best.
Yes, the one with the best SEO strategy. Not the one with the best product or marketing pitch. And obviously the really big companies you named will win because they have the most sheer cash in the bank to throw at the SEO game. They can keep competitive products down not because they are better or even because they are established but simply because they have more cash to throw at a non-productive activity.
You could apply the same "competitiveness" argument to hiring goons or any other sort of business practice that helps one party at the expense of another and adds expense to the development cycle without actually improving the product in any way.
Just because SEO helps somebody win does not mean it is a competitive practice any more than any other anti-competitive practice. This is why practices such as payola and collusion are illegal.
Azelma wrote:
Aestu wrote:
SEO perverts the market and cost structure such that a strong startup product is a disadvantage against a weak established product. That is not good for anyone except incompetent businesses and SEO workers.
What you're describing is a weakness of search engines, if anything. For example, older domains are more "trusted" and Google/Bing value them higher. That has nothing to do with SEO...that's Google's algorithm. If you have been ranking well since 1999 for a term, it's a lot harder for you to be overtaken. Without SEO, that strong startup product has a significantly more difficult (if not impossible) time getting to the front page and competing with more established products.
And results change over time, as reality changes. SEO deliberately subverts the process.
Azelma wrote:
Aestu wrote:
Google is actively opposed to SEO
WROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!!!
The problem is, you don't understand what SEO is. You THINK it's just spamming and doing a bunch of shady things to "game" google and get your site ranked #1. That's called "black hat" SEO. Google "hates" black hat SEOs, people who
over optimize their sites, and do shady things to rank well. That's what Google hates. Google does not hate SEO.
So in other words, it's "competitive", just don't be too good at what you do!
Which is what most of what you linked is about. Google knows they can't take out SEO for the reasons I said - lack of jurisdiction and enforceability - so they're trying to leverage it as part of their monetization scheme. Basically Google is saying, "it's okay if and only if it adds up to money in our pockets".
Azelma wrote:
Yuratuhl wrote:
Plus, search engines who discover SEO practices are within their rights to knock you down.
Again, you're not understanding what SEO is. Having a web site about World of Warcraft and making sure that "World of Warcraft" is in your pages title tags is by definition an SEO practice. Search engines would not "knock you down" for that.
And you don't need to spend a dime on SEO to do it, because it's not SEO at all, it's something any novice webmaster does on the basis of common sense. It's certainly not worth spending vast sums on.
Yuratuhl wrote:
Plus, search engines who discover black hat SEO practices are within their rights to knock you down.
"Black hat" is in the same category as "angel investor". It's pure semantics aimed at drawing a self-serving distinction that doesn't exist (in the case of the latter, amongst penny stock dealers)
If you want to say that black hats and legit SEO are discrete, then what does the latter do (other than simply tag pages)?
