New Ranking Needed
SEO (search engine optimization) is great right? It gives you high search results, better visibility to the people you want to reach, and ultimately can make a lot of money for your company. All of those things are true, but I have to disagree with the premise.
Often when I'm doing research for stories I have to turn to Google for one reason or another. I've found lately that when I do a search for a particular topic, the top results are less and less relevant. Since I've written about SEO, I can tell that the sites listed at the top are companies that have spent a lot of money on whatever key words I've used to get to the top, but they offer no information other than their selling points.
I'm not naïve, I understand that the Internet is seen by businesses as just another channel for them to peddle their wares (many of our articles try to help them do this more efficiently). However, there's no way for the average person searching to know whether a page that comes up in a search result is reputable. When the criteria for hitting the top of search rankings can be bought through keywords and high-paid SEO consultants who manipulate coding and carefully script every word on the site, searching Google for an expert on a topic is no more effective than trying to find a decent mate on a dating site.
In an ideal world no one would have to artificially inflate importance, they would just honestly portray what their company does and let natural search determine who rises to the top. Anytime pay-to-play is entered into the equation, corruption and deception are the result. That's why I was interested in Tim Berners-Lee's (the "father of the internet") suggestion that web pages contain some kind of mark that objectively identifies them as trustworthy or not.
He envisions this as a way to control scams and hoaxes online, but I'd rather see such a system applied to differentiate between objective sources of information and self-interested propaganda. There's too much jockeying for position to create valuable search results anymore. I don't want to be propositioned like a tourist in a third-world country being offered pottery when I try to research a subject online.
There should be a clear difference between search ads and search results. There should also be a tacit understanding that dishonestly optimizing search by trying to cheat the crawlers is wrong. I'll admit that it will never happen, but am I wrong for saying it should?
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