I'm thrilled that Xan Porter is back among the active ranks of search industry bloggers. We've really missed her. She's on a bit of an SEO-related kick, too, which is terrific. The latest posts include:
A Method of Removing Spam from the Index
(Researchers who presented a paper at the www2006 conference) state that: "...a new industry specialized in creating spam information has emerged, called Search Engine Optimization". SEO is hardly a new industry, and is well aware of the penalisations of spam creation, although there are still some spammers in the community...
...They look for noisy links by analysing the relationships between sites instead of pages...The research goes on in the area of spam removal and of rank cleansing for search engines. It is hard to improve precision and recall algorithmically, but it can be improved by dealing with index sanitisation. These methods are useful and are obviously successful to some extent, but it seems unnecessary to portray the SEO industry in a bad light in these modern times.
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Xan. It is no fun to think that the academics of the world consider our entire industry "spam," when 80% of my job or more is actually focused on helping businesses make their sites indexable and/or helping them build great content that's going to attract links - both of which are more in the search engines' interests than against them.
The Impact of SEO on Online Advertising Market
This paper written by BO Xing and Zhangxi Lin from the Texas Tech University discusses the impact of SEO online. The study is conducted in an analytical way, using a number of good resources but has at times a simplistic view of the SEO effort. SEO's are considered to be of "parasitic nature", hindering the good functioning of search engines and cheating the user...
..."No SEO firm knows the ranking algorithm of the search engine, and therefore, SEO practice only improves the chance of ranking improvement, rather than guarantees top ranking. Given an advertiser and advertising requirement, algorithm robustness denotes the effectiveness of SEO with the search engine"...
..."More importantly, a search engine is potentially subject to “freeriding” effect from SEO firms, because of the parasitic nature of these firms.... First, a search engine could optimize its pricing policies for higher-type advertisers to reap higher profit. Second, investment in algorithm robustness has the effect of protecting the investment in algorithm effectiveness. Third, the second market position endows the follower additional benefits due to low sustainability of SEO firms".
Clearly, there needs to be a greater recognition in the academic IR research industries that a difference exists between those who are conducting SE-friendly SEO and those who spam. It seems naive and impractical for researchers to ignore this distinction.
I think the problem is that the SEO/SEM industry is so new and different from previous marketing/advertising industries. There is no easy category or analogy for people to use. Ask yourself how difficult it is for you to describe what you do when you're at a dinner party; this is the same problem that academics, the press, potential clients etc. have.
I've started to talk about my work as "online marketing that uses a combination of public relations and good web design to improve how websites perform and how they rank on search engines."
I defy them to find the parasite in that!
Maybe if we can all agree on some talking points, we can work together to help improve our offline rep.
Gradiva Couzin https://www.yourseoplan.com/
The second paper (or at least the snippet of the second paper that Rand posted) seems to suggest a much riskier model for the search engines than the prevailing one that is out there today. Personally, I translated "robust algorithm" as something along the lines of "paid inclusion hybrid," where the SE's would somehow be able to exhibit greater control over the results.
Seems like a quick way to lose market share if the results that the SE's choose / advertisers pay for aren't relevant, all for the dubious goal of keeping SEO's from somehow "leeching" onto the top listings.
It seems much smarter for the engines, as Rand suggests, to reward sites with clean designs and quality content, which their searchers are more likely to prefer.
I'd like to think that as SEOs we are more like Egyptian plovers than tapeworms...
Agreed. Where the hell did this person come up with the whole parasite analogy? Was no research done at all?
>Clearly, there needs to be a greater recognition in the academic IR research industries that a difference exists between those who are conducting SE-friendly SEO and those who spam.
"Education is a system of imposed ignorance." - Noam Chomsky
The key to Rand's post is this:
"both of which are more in the search engines' interests than against them."
Any researcher/academic who feels that all SEO is essentially spam, obviously has no experience with the industry and is writing research papers based on what they read. If they want to write a good research paper, then they need to get "hands-on" in the industry.
If we (SEOers) are indeed conducting white-hat practices, we essentially help the Google's of the world index the most relevant content. It is a two way relationship.
A repository of academic and 'high-level' research would also be a good thing.
BTW what time is it there for you?
[edit] stupid, I can see what time it is :)