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Friday, April 23, 2004
What's Fair in Love and Google?
Perhaps to the chagrin of the holier-than-thou SEO crowd, Garrett French's column today confronts the notion that there are "black hats" and "white hats" when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. In other words, there are things you can do that cause higher rankings (good SEO) and there are things you can do that can cause lower rankings, perhaps even getting a site "banned" by Google (bad SEO). But those things are better discussed in terms of risk, not morality.
To the uninitiated, there are certain "black hat" techniques as they are called that clearly violate, e.g., Google's, Terms of Sevice (TOS). Examples include cloaking to hide dynamically-generated keyword-stuffed pages, dynamically generating non-"valuable" content-rich directory pages, most doorway redirects, invisible text, etc.
"White hat" SEO's often refer to these techniques as "unethical." Perhaps some language other than English has more forms of the word unethical to provide a more specific meaning. Unfortunately, English doesn't differentiate between, for example, dynamically generating content-rich pages and embezzling from an employer. Both are "unethical" according to the rehetoric of the white hatters.
It's interesting that SEO professionals with a certain mindset tend to characterize the work of others (competitors in most cases) as "unethical." The problems with this characterization are several. First, these words are potentially libelous. If a competitor is damaged, for example in losing a big client because a competitor wrote an email or posted in a forum or blog that a certain company or SEO professional was "unethical," it could very likely be actionable. If it was communicated orally, as in a client meeting, it could be slander.
Second, these "white hats" are defining ethics according to Google's Terms of Service. We all know that Google is a big, powerful company (whose potential for privacy havoc is only beginning to be understood). But since when did one company's rules for how it chooses to display third-party information on its web site become the standard bearer for morality? The answer is, it didn't.
Garrett's column addresses the fundamental point when he quotes Ammon Johns: "[T]o my philosophy, the SEO who refuses to properly inform their clients of all available techniques and the costs risks and benefits is not ethical."
You see, ethics are a purely human issue. If an SEO takes money from a client and does things that cause the client's site to get banned without warning of the risks, then the client has been harmed in the same way that Michael Milliken sold junk bonds. "Give me your money and I'll get you good results," he says, without warning of risks that, had the clients known about, they might have chosen not to participate.
But the issue is what is promised and what is delivered -- between humans. As Leslie Rohde pointed out to me today, Google is a machine. And ethics are between humans, not machines.
In the end, thinking of it this way is more helpful to the discussion. What is the effect on humans? If a human hurts a human -- as when one humans spams the email inboxes of 4 million other humans, wasting their time and money, that's unethical. Though it's also called "spam," it's an entirely different thing when a human creates extra pages on a web site so that it comes up higher in the rankings -- for an otherwise relevant search -- when another human is searching for just that thing. In that case, the other human is not hurt, and she may in fact be helped. Indeed, even white hatters often point out that there can be "good" uses for cloaking or directing Google one way and humans another -- as when you use some of the the same techniques help the Googlebot keep from getting trapped in endless loops within certain confusing web sites.
But helping or not helping Google is not a matter of ethics. Google is a machine; you can't hurt it. As Leslie says, "If the target page provides value to the human, it is ethical, no matter what you did to the machines along the way. Their injury is not our concern."
It's the effect on humans that matters. So when pornsters dynamically create pages wholly unrelated to their content to make their listings pop-up when someone searches for something rated G, that is unethical. It wastes the time of the human searcher in the same way that spam clogs their inbox.
Likewise, if an SEO charges a client to "optimize" their site, telling them they will get higher rankings for competitive words, but does nothing to help them get quality incoming links or tell them they should, knowing full well the client is unlikely to rank well, that's "unethical." Unless the SEO didn't know; then it's incompetence. Or what about the SEO who charges for time spent optimizing alt tags or Meta keyword tags. That doesn't violate Google's TOS, but it doesn't help get higher Google rankings either. So is charging for valueless work unethical? It depends on whether the first human thinks it's valuable to the second human.
Of course, the bottom line is that given the fact that Google doesn't reveal what's actually factored into their algorithm or how it's weighted, reasonable people can argue whether such billable hours are valuable. But in the current environment one thing's certain. Many of these so-called "black hat spam" techniques work like a champ.
So it is certainly frustrating to see a competitor's web site beating yours in the rankings when they are employing these "bad" techniques. Even if you report them to Google or Yahoo, often nothing happens.
In the end, the answer is for the search engines to continue to get smarter, as they have. And SEO's will continue to try to figure out what matters in the alogorithms and conquer the rankings. So the arms race continues . . . and as they say, "All's fair in love and war."
Perhaps to the chagrin of the holier-than-thou SEO crowd, Garrett French's column today confronts the notion that there are "black hats" and "white hats" when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. In other words, there are things you can do that cause higher rankings (good SEO) and there are things you can do that can cause lower rankings, perhaps even getting a site "banned" by Google (bad SEO). But those things are better discussed in terms of risk, not morality.
To the uninitiated, there are certain "black hat" techniques as they are called that clearly violate, e.g., Google's, Terms of Sevice (TOS). Examples include cloaking to hide dynamically-generated keyword-stuffed pages, dynamically generating non-"valuable" content-rich directory pages, most doorway redirects, invisible text, etc.
"White hat" SEO's often refer to these techniques as "unethical." Perhaps some language other than English has more forms of the word unethical to provide a more specific meaning. Unfortunately, English doesn't differentiate between, for example, dynamically generating content-rich pages and embezzling from an employer. Both are "unethical" according to the rehetoric of the white hatters.
It's interesting that SEO professionals with a certain mindset tend to characterize the work of others (competitors in most cases) as "unethical." The problems with this characterization are several. First, these words are potentially libelous. If a competitor is damaged, for example in losing a big client because a competitor wrote an email or posted in a forum or blog that a certain company or SEO professional was "unethical," it could very likely be actionable. If it was communicated orally, as in a client meeting, it could be slander.
Second, these "white hats" are defining ethics according to Google's Terms of Service. We all know that Google is a big, powerful company (whose potential for privacy havoc is only beginning to be understood). But since when did one company's rules for how it chooses to display third-party information on its web site become the standard bearer for morality? The answer is, it didn't.
Garrett's column addresses the fundamental point when he quotes Ammon Johns: "[T]o my philosophy, the SEO who refuses to properly inform their clients of all available techniques and the costs risks and benefits is not ethical."
You see, ethics are a purely human issue. If an SEO takes money from a client and does things that cause the client's site to get banned without warning of the risks, then the client has been harmed in the same way that Michael Milliken sold junk bonds. "Give me your money and I'll get you good results," he says, without warning of risks that, had the clients known about, they might have chosen not to participate.
But the issue is what is promised and what is delivered -- between humans. As Leslie Rohde pointed out to me today, Google is a machine. And ethics are between humans, not machines.
In the end, thinking of it this way is more helpful to the discussion. What is the effect on humans? If a human hurts a human -- as when one humans spams the email inboxes of 4 million other humans, wasting their time and money, that's unethical. Though it's also called "spam," it's an entirely different thing when a human creates extra pages on a web site so that it comes up higher in the rankings -- for an otherwise relevant search -- when another human is searching for just that thing. In that case, the other human is not hurt, and she may in fact be helped. Indeed, even white hatters often point out that there can be "good" uses for cloaking or directing Google one way and humans another -- as when you use some of the the same techniques help the Googlebot keep from getting trapped in endless loops within certain confusing web sites.
But helping or not helping Google is not a matter of ethics. Google is a machine; you can't hurt it. As Leslie says, "If the target page provides value to the human, it is ethical, no matter what you did to the machines along the way. Their injury is not our concern."
It's the effect on humans that matters. So when pornsters dynamically create pages wholly unrelated to their content to make their listings pop-up when someone searches for something rated G, that is unethical. It wastes the time of the human searcher in the same way that spam clogs their inbox.
Likewise, if an SEO charges a client to "optimize" their site, telling them they will get higher rankings for competitive words, but does nothing to help them get quality incoming links or tell them they should, knowing full well the client is unlikely to rank well, that's "unethical." Unless the SEO didn't know; then it's incompetence. Or what about the SEO who charges for time spent optimizing alt tags or Meta keyword tags. That doesn't violate Google's TOS, but it doesn't help get higher Google rankings either. So is charging for valueless work unethical? It depends on whether the first human thinks it's valuable to the second human.
Of course, the bottom line is that given the fact that Google doesn't reveal what's actually factored into their algorithm or how it's weighted, reasonable people can argue whether such billable hours are valuable. But in the current environment one thing's certain. Many of these so-called "black hat spam" techniques work like a champ.
So it is certainly frustrating to see a competitor's web site beating yours in the rankings when they are employing these "bad" techniques. Even if you report them to Google or Yahoo, often nothing happens.
In the end, the answer is for the search engines to continue to get smarter, as they have. And SEO's will continue to try to figure out what matters in the alogorithms and conquer the rankings. So the arms race continues . . . and as they say, "All's fair in love and war."
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
You've got (G)Mail!
So who are all these people who have had gmail accounts for two weeks now? I logged into Blogger today and, lo and behold, there's a big offer to sign up for gmail. And a notice that the link only works once, so don't tell your friends.
There are plenty of screen shots elsewhere, but here's another:
To see a more detailed review and vertitable gmail users guide written by someone with more time on their hands, click here.
As to the idea of gmail itself, comments so far (after everyone figured out that the April Fool's Day announcement was not a joke) have mostly centered around the alleged privacy implications of giving one company all your emails and letting them dig through them, albeit with computers, to figure out what ads to deliver. I say alleged privacy implications for several reasons:
1. People already store all their email on other companies' servers, e.g., Hotmail and Yahoo mail.
2. We all know the NSA's computers are already scanning every email we send looking for bomb threats. Right?
3. Yahoo and Hotmail already deliver large, annoying ads to all their users right in the middle of the application. Why would anyone want to fault Google for trying to deliver more relevant ads (that you might actually be interested in) based on the content of the emails you're getting and sending. Believe me, no one at Google has time to read your email. Everyone's too busy planning an IPO and shopping for yachts.
4. Anyone who uses the Googe toolbar, which many of us feel naked without, have no right to complain. Every web page they ever visit is tracked, and the cookie is stored on your computer with an expiration date of...never. [Hey, I used the word naked (twice now). When I receive this posting as an email in gmail, I wonder if Google will deliver porn ads. Actually, I'm pretty sure they don't. Guess we'll find out....naked girls naked cute girls naked hot girls.]
And don't let anyone tell you keyword stuffing doesn't work anymore.
So who are all these people who have had gmail accounts for two weeks now? I logged into Blogger today and, lo and behold, there's a big offer to sign up for gmail. And a notice that the link only works once, so don't tell your friends.
There are plenty of screen shots elsewhere, but here's another:
To see a more detailed review and vertitable gmail users guide written by someone with more time on their hands, click here.
As to the idea of gmail itself, comments so far (after everyone figured out that the April Fool's Day announcement was not a joke) have mostly centered around the alleged privacy implications of giving one company all your emails and letting them dig through them, albeit with computers, to figure out what ads to deliver. I say alleged privacy implications for several reasons:
1. People already store all their email on other companies' servers, e.g., Hotmail and Yahoo mail.
2. We all know the NSA's computers are already scanning every email we send looking for bomb threats. Right?
3. Yahoo and Hotmail already deliver large, annoying ads to all their users right in the middle of the application. Why would anyone want to fault Google for trying to deliver more relevant ads (that you might actually be interested in) based on the content of the emails you're getting and sending. Believe me, no one at Google has time to read your email. Everyone's too busy planning an IPO and shopping for yachts.
4. Anyone who uses the Googe toolbar, which many of us feel naked without, have no right to complain. Every web page they ever visit is tracked, and the cookie is stored on your computer with an expiration date of...never. [Hey, I used the word naked (twice now). When I receive this posting as an email in gmail, I wonder if Google will deliver porn ads. Actually, I'm pretty sure they don't. Guess we'll find out....naked girls naked cute girls naked hot girls.]
And don't let anyone tell you keyword stuffing doesn't work anymore.
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
In the Can
Search Engine Radio launched today. It's the first Internet talk radio show (or any talk radio show, I'm sure) 100% dedicated to Search. If you missed the first one, don't worry, the shows are archived at the host wsradio.com. wsRadio.com is the largest Internet talk radio station, producing shows by eBay and Entrepreneur Magazine, among others.
I'm hosting the show on Tuesday's at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, 9:00 a.m. Pacific on www.wsradio.com.
Today, my guest was Barbara "WebMama" Coll, founder of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization). As always, WebMama makes for lively conversation. (I knew this from the panel we spoke on at the Kelsey Group's local search conference last month in Santa Clara.)
Producer Lee Mirabal, who was a syndicated host on NBC, said the first one was an A+. Thanks, Barb! For topic ideas for SEORadio.com, or guest suggestions, email show@seoradio.com.
Next week's guest is Leslie Rohde, owner of Windrose Software and creator of OptiLink, an indispensable link analysis tool for SEO professionals. Check our OptiLink here.
Search Engine Radio launched today. It's the first Internet talk radio show (or any talk radio show, I'm sure) 100% dedicated to Search. If you missed the first one, don't worry, the shows are archived at the host wsradio.com. wsRadio.com is the largest Internet talk radio station, producing shows by eBay and Entrepreneur Magazine, among others.
I'm hosting the show on Tuesday's at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, 9:00 a.m. Pacific on www.wsradio.com.
Today, my guest was Barbara "WebMama" Coll, founder of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization). As always, WebMama makes for lively conversation. (I knew this from the panel we spoke on at the Kelsey Group's local search conference last month in Santa Clara.)
Producer Lee Mirabal, who was a syndicated host on NBC, said the first one was an A+. Thanks, Barb! For topic ideas for SEORadio.com, or guest suggestions, email show@seoradio.com.
Next week's guest is Leslie Rohde, owner of Windrose Software and creator of OptiLink, an indispensable link analysis tool for SEO professionals. Check our OptiLink here.
