Search Engine Optimization Discovered in Miami
March 2, 2011
You know a story is bit time when it is covered in a two page article in the Miami Herald. Miami, of course, is the capitol city of The Islands, as The Nine Nations of North America pointed out years ago.
The point of the story is that search engine optimization experts—trained at conferences partially underwritten by the Web indexing services—have learned how to fool the Web search engines. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, but it is perfectly okay to fool the Web indexes. Hey, traffic equals ad revenue and has for years. Now the Miami Herald has discovered “The Dark World of Search Engine Manipulation.” There you go.
According the article:
Now Google is incorporating recommendations from your social media “friends” to personalize the search results you get. Who authorized Google to help itself to that information? And precisely how will your so-called friends’ opinions alter the rankings you see? Google is an extraordinary company, and its credo of “do no harm” is impressive. But it’s difficult to think of another private, profit-seeking entity that has ever exercised such vast power over what the world thinks about and pays attention to. That’s a profoundly public function, and with it comes an obligation of accountability that Google has so far bungled.
Will the Miami Herald’s insight have an impact? Does anyone know how social media can be manipulated to spoof relevance?
Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, March 2, 2011
Freebie unlike the ads on the major Web search engines
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