[pbhjpbhj]

>For one tiny span of time the SEO world is given a taste of its own medicine. //

I'm surprised at you for ascribing evil to an entire online industrial sector; I'd think you'd take a more circumspect approach.

Y'know, given that the next line is tantamount to 'I perpetrated a massive copyright infringement on hundreds of thousands of people's online content'; that you might feel that even tortuous actions can sometimes be justified.

People do bad things in most (all?) areas of human activity; SEOs can do good too IMO. It decreases the impact of any analysis to ignore that SEO is a valid activity - albeit, yes, sometimes done in malicious, invalid and/or immoral ways.

[jacquesm]

I call them as I see them. If you want to characterize reocities.com as a copyright infringement case then I invite you to sue.

I take it you have a similar attitude towards archive.org?

SEO's act the same way arms dealers act during an armed conflict. They will happily sell their weapons to all sides while they profit without creating any value for anybody. I don't care one bit about how much traffic google sends me on either ww.com, reocities.com or any of the other web properties that I maintain, I've yet to 'SEO optimize' anything and I feel that SEO's are as an industry just one notch above mass spammers. In some cases worse than spammers (because they actively destroy good websites).

I tend to be rather black-and-white about this because as a webmaster I have to fight these jerks on a regular basis and it tends to show in how I write about them. Consider me pissed off. I feel like I'm in the middle of a shoot-out between Google on the one side, and a bunch of over-active greedy script kiddies and their customers on the other.

If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game. The only value SEO's create is for themselves.

[pbhjpbhj]

Perhaps ask your "madebyabi" associate whose front page links to http://www.projectweb.gr/seo-consultant.html if you're interested in the work of SEO consultants?

Considering reocities vs. archive.org and in light of copyright law:

Is reocities a registered non-profit organisation? Do archive.org do this - http://imgur.com/vKHha2M to pages to add donation links? (Answer: https://web.archive.org/web/20100218100003/http://www.geocit...). This used to be called "framing" and was considered about the scummiest thing domain owners could do - wrap other peoples content in a frame that was intended to harvest money, or rebadge, without doing anything else.

This was just a random page choice (the imgur.com) link. It's interesting to note they expected the page to be withdrawn, except now it's still here. Archive.org record, at least, that the content owner removed all content and the [new?] domain owner 302ed the site to http://www.ki-society.com/english/.

Archive.org, along with Google, at least at some point was committing copyright infringement in the USA I believe. In the UK (probably NL too by virtue of EU legislation) both these bodies, and the likes of reocities, definitely are still acting tortuously. In USA Field vs Google established a change to the Fair Use rulings that considered SERPs to be transformative and that cached copies - as temporary and unmodified (neither of which reocities pages are) - should be allowed in view of the transformative nature (the court effectively asserting that Google's copy wouldn't be used for content viewing !!).

Internet Archive were sued in 2007 by Shell, http://archive.org/post/119669/lawsuit-settled, and settled stating that Shell's copyright was "valid and enforceable". Internet Archive were sued in 2005 (Healthcare Advocates v.) for failing to remove past archives when a site owner had updated their robots.txt - clearly reocities have no way of assessing a current content owners wishes as to continued archiving.

There is a library exclusion in the USC for archiving digital content (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/2003/11/10/digital_preservation_...) but it requires the content to be kept off-line and only accessible by those physically present. This could be used, or donation of the content to Archive.org or such, if the purpose of the reocities project was simply preservation for posterity.

Aside: The facts of tortuous infringement aren't at all related to my ability to raise finance and sue you on behalf of those content creators whose content you copied without permission (AFAICT none of my content made it through FWIW). I have no wish to at this time. Although presumably I'd only need to issue a DMCA take-down notice as otherwise the domain itself could be targeted for take-down (as it's a .com). But, like Google, I don't think you care if reocities is copyright infringing, do you? You appear to consider the law to be errant and so choose to ignore it.

tl;dr reocities is not transformative (it's just a "framed" copy), is potentially modified without license, is commercial (ie is not registered non-profit and requests donations and is used for SEO purposes (eg footer links to an SEO!)). Ergo not Fair Use in USA (where the content was copied from).

[jacquesm]

Abi made the logo and did some of the css, he did so in record time after I put in a call here on HN if there was someone that could do some design. I was not aware of his SEO activities and I promise solemnly that he did not do anything of the sort for reocities. You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity, I have no idea what it is that you think you're proving but I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

As for the rest of your rather long comment, in creating reocities, I, right along with archive team and a bunch of others performed a public service, at considerable expense both in time and funds I might add.

If you feel that your content was copied unjustly then you are free to use the self-service tool to remove it, and if you can't use the self service tool then I'll remove it for you on first request (assuming you are the author of the content).

I've received many thousands of notes from people who were extremely happy their content got saved, and many thousands of requests to remove content, the vast majority of which have been honored. A few by people who are not the original creators were not honored (most of these: SEO scum trying to increase the visibility of their customers by attempting to force offline pages that they don't like).

If you feel like mis-characterizing this you're totally welcome to do so, but I fear that that says more about you than it does about me.

[pbhjpbhj]

>You're really trying very hard here to tie me to SEO activity //

I was merely suggesting that the guy that did your website might not be the scum of the Earth you seem to believe all SEOs are and thinking that - as you appear to judge characters well in general, obv. not mine ;0) - he might be able to disavow you of that notion. When he designed your reocities layout he designed in on-page SEO ... horror! Indeed his prime motivation might well have been the footer link, perhaps he is evil after all.

OK, so 'everyone loves reocities' (many people love torrent hosts too); but it's still a massive copyright infringement. Personally I think the content that people cared about was saved, moved, backed up already and that very little would have been lost that was worth keeping. The real value was to harvest the content to stick an ad-block or donation wrapper around it.

The point where we started [my paraphrase of course] was that you ostensibly said "all SEO are scum" and I said that as you were able to see past your own tortuous activities to see your perceived good in them I found it strange that you'd classify everyone working in SEO, like your web-designer, that way.

I find it really hard to see how you think making sure a website gets a deserved position in the SERPs (yes SEO can be used nefariously too, I'm not denying that) is so evil. Yet you think wrapping someone else's work up in a donation and ad-banner that take up half-a-screen without so much a as a by-your-leave is fine.

If it's about saving content owners then you can simply announce "all content owners wishing their content to be retained on reocities contact us by December 2015; content we don't have a license to use will be removed at that date". You can even keep an offline copy of the archive if you're in to historic preservation. Even better, if you cared at all about not infringing on peoples copyright would be to have the content available and put it up at owners request - or if a fair use argument for a particular piece of content was made.

I've said it before - you're well off the mark both morally and legally with this one I'm afraid.

[SquareWheel]

>If you feel SEO can do good show me an example where an SEO achieved value creation rather than shifting around a percentage in some zero sum game.

Your generalizations are really quite misguided. SEOs achieve value when they optimize sites to fit Google's guidelines, which as it happens also benefits humans. Converting Flash sites to HTML, reorganizing the URL structure to convert ?articleid=5 to /my-great-article/, adding alt tags for screen readers, optimizing page speed, creating sitemaps, cleaning up 404s. Whitehat SEOs are often the caretakers of the web.

It's easy to focus on the bad guys who spam keywords and buy likes, but it's ignorant to assume that's all the industry consists of.

[jacquesm]

No, that does not create value. It creates the impression of creating value, but in actual fact the same number of $ are spent online so the only thing that changes is where the money is spent. Value creation is a way to get out of the zero sum game.

[rfergie]

If a business X is 5% better than business Y (for whatever reason) and marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y then value is being created.

[jacquesm]

If you ask the business owners of X and Y which business is the better one then I'm sure that you'll get two different answers.

I don't think it is so hard to see that value creation is something that can't exist without creation. So when you take a set of low value inputs and you combine them (say, raw materials + energy + labour) and you then get something that you can sell for more than the inputs were worth then you have created value.

Marketing by itself does not create value (other than that it diverts some funds to the marketeer and possibly some funds from consumers to companies whose products are being marketed). Marketing creates turnover, not value.

[rfergie]

Ok, let me be less vague:

If business X is 5% cheaper than business Y then value for the customer is created if they go to business X rather than Y.

In your example, no value is created at all if the product never sells no matter how good it might be in theory

[Isofarro]

"marketing helps a customer go to business X rather than business Y"

That is a succinct description of a zero-sum game.

* Business X gains the same amount business Y loses.

There is no additional value!

[kwijybobyjiwk]

Business X may easily gain more than business Y loses, if the site cleanup yields a site that's easier to find, has more descriptive content, and is more accessible. Y's previously higher ranking may have caused some potential buyers in a product space to abandon looking--even if temporarily--due to lack of time or loss of interest. X might have a good product that missed some sales due to a "meh" reaction to Y's previously higher-ranked site.

Marketing effect can be difficult to quantify, but it's about more than ad dollars and the bottom line is definitely not a zero-sum game. While SEO doesn't lack for bad actors, white-hat SEO can help grow markets.

[rfergie]

There are more ways of generating value then just creating new customers.

For example, if the number of customers can be the same but if they are served better or cheaper than the competition then value is created

[UweSchmidt]

The activities that you've described seem quite basic: either something that any amateur can do by following a todo list, if the CMS doesn't take care of that anyway (prompt for alt tags, have sane URLs as default etc.).

While the SEO industry might be doing that also, that seems to be a fig leave for the actual activities.

Or is anyone making a living being the caretaker of the web, cleaning up 404s?

[walshemj]

Ok

I used to be in house SEO for a large publisher (wont say which one but you would know the name) one project we did was a recovery after a botched transition of a property website (similar presence to Zillow or right move) they screwed up their browse structure migration

I also detected and got fixed a mistake on a large UK recruitment site that was costing them £500,000 in 5 days.

Btw I am available at reasonable rates for consulting/ explaining to your developers how to do their job properly