machines dont understand anything at the moment. the big problem in my view is the chicken and egg will we store our data in the right way first or will the search engines educate us what they need?

respects

Ian Harper

I think I first read the phrase OOP back in 2000 at WMW. The debates back then were fast and furious as people got frenzied over the use of words and markup. Eventually people kinda settled and got on with making good sites that people liked and came back to.

It’s a shabby situation really. MC comes out with such statements and sends a shudder through the SEO world. It’s fine to say oh it’s only kw stuffing or aggressive links etc but the reality is that come any update, they’ll be a raft of false positives and quality resources will get hit.

It’s an easy thing to hide behind a black box mentality and say its all about quality and that if site x fell, then it’s because they overstepped the mark and now need to reevaluate their on and off site SEO. It’s yet another lever for them to pull and send out that underlying message of SEO might actually be that little bit risky, so you’d better make sure you’re doing it right and fair else we’ll come and bash you and that actually, maybe you should reconsider some of that marketing budget and spend it on Adwords.

Unless you’re on page 2 or 3 there’s nothing wrong with the SERPS today. You just have to work harder at some of the things you allude to. If the existing system isn’t already picking up on kw stuffing (ffs really!!) then either I’m simply searching for obscure stuff that looks normal or it simply isn’t an issue. As for the link stuff, will sites or more to the point can Google really afford to ding sites with too aggressive a link pattern, and is it really so difficult to just quietly dial down link power?

In isolation it’s anti SEO sabre rattling delivered in that timeless style of the baby faced assassin, in reality it’s probably not very much too concerned with and we’d best spend some time untwisting our knickers.

OK, I’m calm(er) now. Over the weekend I was thinking about microdata and reading some posts from RDFa/HTML5 people who weren’t happy that Bing, Google, and Yahoo have decided on schema.org for structured data.

Just searched on “search engine help”–hits=Google (924,000,000), Bing (491,000,000–better algo, right?). At 10 results per page that’s 92 million Google pages or 49 million Bing pages. I asked my 15 year old son how many pages deep he goes. He said “Two, then I tighten my search.” “How many times do you search?” “Maybe three.”

Above, you said: “…how not good Google is [at] determining what is or is not a useful page.” [note: not an apologist here, but] I think that content-wise the web all-up has to be a train wreck for the engines. How can they really pull the top 50 results out of a half billion without some signaling help?

Findable. Maybe not such a great word, but certainly a powerful idea–could findability make common cause with users, engines, and businesses?

Of course ‘if it’s done right’ is a bit of a Hail Mary where Google is involved.

I might live on an island, and you might not. ;)

But in the end it doesn’t really matter seeing how its Google’s definition that we have understand to make sense of statements like these. And that’s the tough part because they tend to get pretty wishy washy about defining words.

Its also understandable when SEO’s “over react” on statements like this, after Google has made it clear in the past, that they aren’t really helping us.

You’re right, if you’re trying to get in cheap and have your SEO pull miracles out of content you haven’t given them, this may give you a slap, just like Panda and some of the other updates have recently. It’s about being better than that. If your client isn’t willing to make that investment, they should be finding a new SEO. I know we wouldn’t stand for it around here.