It is incomprehensible that techcrunch.com or any respectable site would allow a blog like this
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/the-time-has-come-to-regulate-search-engine-marketing-and-seo/
by an annonymous author to be posted on their site. Obviously, the author wishes to remain annonymous because he/she is as misinformed as a person can get.
Check it out and come back to vent. Of course, absolutely vent on the TechCrunch site as they deserve it.
Vent? Why vent? The guy's completely right.
Vent? Why vent? The guy's completely right.
Not what I was expecting from you Canada Fred so I am interested to know why you are not concerned about this? As far as I am concerned the last thing anyone needs is any government getting involved in the regulating of how a company promotes itself. For every good thing they have done (stopping the use of cartoon characters to sell tobacco products) most governments end up causing more problems than they solve.
The main thrust of this is that because Google is top dog right now they dictate the world so we need to bring government in to level the playing field. Government is notoriously bad at that because their ideas of fairness, more often than not, are determined by political considerations. The free market fixes itself. As we discuss this, the company that will knock google off the top of the mountain could be working to just that. 10 years ago AOL was top dog and now they are a ghost of their former self. Where I live in NY, if you wanted TV then it was a choice between Cablevision and rabbit ears. Now Dish Network, Direct TV and Fios are causing Cablevision fits.
Is the current Google-dominated situation bad, yes and no. As the author points out in his example of PPC, company A spends $1 per click and company B spends $.10 per click but because company B has a more compelling ad they get just as many click throughs as company A. The market fixed itself. If company A wants to beat company B then create better ads.
As much as I have agreed with a lot you have said on SEO topics in terms of standards and ethics, I think you are off on this one.
I don't really have much of a problem with Adwords (it is actually a brilliant search engine marketing model), Adsense, on the other hand, is a disaster; worshiped as a god in some places, but that's another story.
From a search engine optimizer's perspective, I ask myself: why should a webpage be rewarded in any degree for successfully manipulating a search engine; especially for artificially enhancing the volume, credibility and relevancy of links. How did links become the pot of gold whereas anybody, anywhere in the world, could profit just by exploiting links? Links once had usefulness and English words had meaning.
Then I ask myself from an ethical business perspective, out of concern for my neighbours and my once proud industry: How can one search engine become the middleman who so generously awards money, success and free marketing to webpage promotions designed to exploit, pillage and plunder the average, unknowing, deceived consumer and finally, how can the misuse of links for profit (ad click scams, global, celled and satellite click warehouses) be such an easy source of revenue, off the backs of the average Joe web site owner; how cvould Joe's search engine marketing budget be so easily diverted; sometimes to causes that have malicious intent. These troubling questions cannot be resolved with transparency. Unfortunately, in today's search engine world, everything that a search engine does is a trade secret.
I agree, why a company will disclose their trade secret?
Well, so many contrasting ideas could be mentioned about the way SEO and SEM worlds are working and how search engines like Google are trying to come up with justice in terms of crediting the honest, professional or other sites with their web rankings.
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