Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice description of the hell of modern WWW.

But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd.

My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page:

(http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/)

(http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/)

> Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selection of Glasses Cases / Spectacle Cases / Sunglass Cases.

> Made from leather, fabric, metal or plastic finished to a very high quality. Hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.

> Welcome to AGlassesCase.co.uk. The one stop shop for Glasses Cases, Spectacle Cases and Sunglass Cases. We also sell a number of Glasses Cloths

> Made from a range of quality materials including leather, fabric, metal and plastic all finished to a very high standard. We sell hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.

These two different sites are the same company.

Maybe they're a great place to buy spectacles cases from, but it's vaguely upsetting that Google can create freakin' awesome stuff (A self driving car! It is actually wonderful and futuristic) yet can't fix this stuff. Obviously, Google are not to blame, and really the problem is with sleazy SEO and odd behaviours by vendors.

I think Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are examples of SEO'd sites too. For example: Stack Exchange had problems with indexing before they added a sitemap [1]. Wikipedia takes a lot of care to create machine-indexable pages with quality content, that link back to their sources [2] and are linked to internally. Both follow SEO best practices as described in the Google Quality Guidelines [3]

Or your definition of "SEO'd" is leaning more to manipulative/sleazy.

In your example about the spectacle cases, would the other site being an affiliate make a (huge) difference? If Google punishes companies that have more than one website, people would shift to affiliates or try to hide they own the websites in other ways. In a way I feel multiple McDonalds in one city is perfectly possible. However, there needs to be a balance between the "best" websites (be they from the same owner or not) and diversity of the results (a query deserves diversity).

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-importance-of-s... "We knew from the outset that Google would be a big part of our traffic, and I wanted us to rank highly in Google"

[2] http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ "In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites."

[3] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

Yes, you're right. I tend to use "SEOd" as being a bit sleazy, rather than just following best current practice.

The term "SEO" is a bit like "Hacker" in that to most people it carries a negative connotation.

I've noticed some people will use the terms "black hat SEO" and "white hat SEO" to distinguish between sleazy and not-sleazy SEO practices.

SEO = gaming search engines = negative behavior.

White hat SEO = following a search engine's rules = positive behavior.

Disparage not that which you do not understand.

If the goal of SEO is to manipulate a site's position in search engine rankings, I don't care what color the hat is. I don't want the site's owner to be able to do that. I want the results of my searches to be based on their relevance to my query, and not on the degree to which the people who stand to profit from my attention to their sites have manipulated the system.

The ultimate search engine would be ungameable, and SEO would be a waste of time because it would accomplish nothing. To the degree that SEO works at all, it is a bad thing.

Google itself explicitly encourages people to SEO their sites. So much so that they publish a SEO starter guide for webmasters and SEO professionals [1].

SEO isn't what you think it is, yet you continue to paint all of SEO with your broad brush. Stop.

[1] (pdf) - https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrus...

Are you claiming that "SEO" no longer stands for "search engine optimization", or are you claiming that "search engine optimization" is no longer about "optimizing" a site for "search engine" result placement?

It's all about the scope of what you would consider "SEO" projects. Would you consider creating search-friendly URLs SEO projects or just best practices?

That's one of the first things I think about when I look at a site from a SEO perspective: can the bots easily digest this site.

I'm claiming that your characterization of all such "optimization" as malicious is misguided.

White hat is not exploiting the rules of a game, it is following the rules. Proper SEO according to G is doing everything you can to make your site interact well with crawlers. That's akin to following directions when applying for a job, or following the rules when playing a sport. You can't be considered for the job if you don't apply properly, and you'll soon be disqualified if you ignore the rules of a sport. Same with search: if your site doesn't comply with a search engine's standards for crawling, you won't have the opportunity to be ranked fairly.

A large part of SEO is just making it obvious what your page is about. This helps both the user and the search engine. A lot of it is just usability, but usability specifically for a user who is coming from a search engine.

I think I need to link to the relevant XKCD here: http://xkcd.com/810/ And to slightly paraphrase: "But what will you do when Spammers provide useful and relevant content" "Mission Fucking Accomplished"

I'm not saying that's where we are -- But that's hopefully the end-goal

I noticed this when looking to mail-order some espresso pods: there were eight versions of the same shitty German mail-order company in the top 30 results or so, each trying to look like an independent site targeting a different audience, which you only found out were the same when you tried to check out and saw the same ridiculous extra fees tacked on in the shopping cart. Took forever to find a legit store which was not run by the same guy.

Eight versions targeting different audiences? Sounds almost like something patio11 might suggest...

Twist: He earns all his money by selling nespresso capsules. There has never been any consulting or AP business. It's all coffee.

Do you remember your query?

Interestingly, though much of the content is the same, those domains resolve to different IP addresses, not just the same server tweaking the page for different domains as I thought.

Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.spectaclecases.co.uk Address: 83.170.88.134

Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.aglassescase.co.uk Address: 83.170.70.106

Presumably they have two different webservers, perhaps connected to the same ordering system/db server. I guess they could be using a virtualisation service and found this easier to set up.

The different IPs are for SSL and they are hosted here: https://vps.net

If you haven't seen it yet, you should check out millionshort.com . I think the idea is that it skims off the top layer of scum from search results, hopefully revealing good results that didn't SEO.

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