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by kccqzy
2349 days ago
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Not to totally detract from your point, but my previous experience with SEO people showed that some SEO strategies actually not only improve page ranking, but also actual usability. The first, and the most important perhaps was page load speed. We adopted a slightly more complicated pipeline on the server side, reduced the amount of JS required by the page, and made page loading faster. That improved both the ranking and actual usability. The second was that SEO people told us our homepage contained too many graphics and too few text, so search engines didn't quite extract as much content from our pages. We responded by adding more text in addition to the fancy eye-catching graphics. That improved both the ranking and actual accessibility of the site. |
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I really wish everyone would qualify, and not just black-hat seo / whitehat - there are many types of SEO, often with different intentions.
I understand there has been a lot of google koolaid (and others) about how seo is evil it's poisoning the web, etc...
But now, or has it been a couple years how? google had a video come out saying an SEO firm is okay if they tell you it takes 6 months... they have upgraded their pagespeed tool which helps with seo, and were quite public about how they wanted ssl/https on everything and that that would help with google seo..
so there are different levels of SEO, someone mentioned an seo plugin I was using on a site as being a negative indicator, and I chuckled - the only thing that plugin does is try to fix some of the inherent obvious screwups of wordpress out of the box... things like no meta description which google flags on webmaster tools as multiple same meta descriptions.. also tries to alleviate duplicate content penalties by no-indexing archives or and categories or whatever.
So there is SEO that is trying to work with google, and then there is SEO where someone goes out and puts comments on 10,000 web sites only for the reason of ranking higher.. to me that is kind of grey hat if it was a few comments, but shady if it's hundreds and especially if it's automated..
but real blackhat stuff - hacking other web sites and adding links.. or having a site that is selling breast enlarging pills and trying to get people who type in a keyword for britney spears.. that is trying to fool people.
I have built sites with good info and had to do things to make them prettier for the ranking bot, but they are giving the surfer what they are looking for when they type 'whatever phrase'... I have also made web sites better when trying to also get them to show up in top results.
So it's not always seo=bad, sometimes seo=good for the algorythm and the users.
and sometimes it's madness - like extra fluff to keep a visitor on page longer to keep google happy like recipes - haha - many different flavors of it - and different intentions.