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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Wrong? No. And not as naive as the suggestion appears to be.
Since Google is the only game in town and sets the standard for SERPs (who really cares about Yahoo, MSN, etc?) it is honest to seek to optimise your own pages. But it's up to Google (etc) to work out how to weed out the trash.
If I start a new business I don't want to be penalised by yet another damned certification money making scheme, some sort of "Gosh this site is trusted because it can afford to pay to be" sticker. I want to start to trade without another artificial obstacle. I run trusted sites - an example is ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com, put here as an example of a site that is reasonably optimised, reasonably informative, and well ranked in relevant searches. Adding a sticker to that site is pointless. People judge when they visit if they want to stay and read, or if it was not what they wanted.
Some years ago I experimented with cloaking. Google bans you if you cloak (serve different pages to spidering bots and to the public). The site I cloaked achieved a certain SERP. I took cloaking off. The SERP rose.
Sites are already penalised for inbound links from link farms (Big G has a place to report them, too!), keyword stuffing, White on White schemes, Bad neighbourhoods (though how those are defined I have no idea), and pretty much all the ruses that the alleged SEO companies use.
Wikipedia and sites like Train Spotting World use the attribute rel="nofollow" to ensure that no value is passed along with a link, that the only value is the link itself.
SEO is pretty well regulated by search engines. Use a lousy one to search with and you'll get lousy results!
Adverts are also pretty well catered for. Everyone knows they are there. No-one cares. We click what we want to click. They have no effect on SERP anyway. And even those at the head of the listing are well delineated as adverts.
Yes, I still get fed up with sites that scrape my description and then only serve adverts from their pages, but I'm a big boy, I can cope with that as a business which has a web site, and as a person seeking other businesses or services.
With your idea, how will I ever find the one forum that deals with the error message "This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer"? It isn't a trusted site that will get you the answer to the disabling error message, certainly not MicroSoft, whose error message it is!
I think you raise a good question, Jeremy, but I don't think some sort of trusted mark is the answer. I think we have to go with the flow and lobby search engines to weed out the trash. Spoofing a trusted mark isn't ever going to be hard, after all!