[jshen]

"you'll find that your information gets drowned out by content that has been SEO'd to the hilt. But even if that were the case I'd blame the SEO guys, not the search engine."

Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types.

"The fact that google is a monopoly is our collective problem, not google's, it's only a monopoly because we let them"

This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible.

"The thing that could happen in your use-case is that someone would end up finding their information somewhere else or that they would engage with someone else. The only case where there would be a loss to them (your hypothetical visitor) is if they would not engage with anybody at all"

No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them.

"Demanding they do better is tantamount to dictating that an advance in technology be made, maybe the problem is harder than it seems?"

I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.

[jacquesm]

> Maybe, but the part that bothers me is that if you listen to Matt Cutt's he basically says that you should make good content, make a good user experience, build a relationship with your audience, and not think about SEO explicitly. This isn't true for large swathes of content types.

I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines. Not that anybody will listen to that because after all it is easy money but it is very unwise from a business perspective. Do you see Apple spend time on checking their 'link profile' (new term I learned today)?

> This is like saying that we don't need antitrust laws because it's our own fault if we allow them to become a monopoly or get into some other situation where fair competition isn't possible.

No, anti-trust is about anti-competitive behaviour by a monopolist (or a de-facto monopolist), it is not about forcing companies to act in the public interest. They probably should but that's a totally different problem.

So anti-trust would be google squashing duckduckgo.com through some trick using their de-facto monopoly to get rid of a nasty little upstart.

> No, there is a loss if the only content they find at the top of google is demand media style content with no good information but that is SEO'd to the hilt, and people with good and real content can't outrank them.

Yes, and that's exactly the sort of thing that google is finally addressing. I loathe demand media and all the sites operating on that principle.

> I mostly agree, but I think this is a bit too simplistic. I worked on search engines for years and fully understand how hard this problem is. I don't know the answer to this problem, but I see a clear problem or problems. One of which is Google's PR which says "hey, just make a good site with good content and the rest will take care of itself". They aren't really being honest here. For years they dodged the question of negative SEO.

We agree on that they are dodging the question of negative SEO, and it is bad they do that but I can see that Google's image will take a nosedive if they admit that the issue is beyond their technical capabilities. They're essentially lying about this, but what else is new in corporate country?

I wished someone would find a way to make a search engine that uses a completely different aspect to rank pages than the link graph (maybe back to on-page?) and that that search engine would take away 50% of googles' share. That way the SEO dudes would be in for a much harder time.

>

[tripzilch]

> I'd go one step further and I'd say: stop making sites that only exist by the grace of search engines.

You are aware that there are large (enormous) swathes of Internet users whose primary mode of navigation is typing whatever they want to visit into Google, trusting it'll correct their (terrible) misspellings, and click one of the first few links of the first result page?

There will type URLs there. Like "Apple.com". Because they don't know what URLs are for, any more.

It sounds to me, if you really suggest to stop making sites for these people, you're not actually aware how numerous they are. They are both the old, and the new generations.

Yes it's sad this is the case. But they are people. What if they are searching for some niche information (like a disease, as another poster already pointed out), but the honest blog post that'd be useful for them has been torpedoed out of the water with this "negative SEO", in favour of some scummy SEO site trying to sell them ineffective fake medicine (or whatever).

Is that too far-fetched? I don't know, but it seems to me that giving evil SEOers the power to blast sites from Google's index by abusing "negative SEO", is a bad thing in general. Your argument seems to be that it'll give SEOers a taste of their own medicine, which I agree that will probably happen. But there will be collateral too, and I don't think that's worth it.

[jshen]

anti-trust is broader than your definition. From wikipedia.

"United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws, which regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. The main statutes are the Sherman Act 1890, the Clayton Act 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act 1914. These Acts, first, restrict the formation of cartels and prohibit other collusive practices regarded as being in restraint of trade. Second, they restrict the mergers and acquisitions of organizations which could substantially lessen competition. Third, they prohibit the creation of a monopoly and the abuse of monopoly power."

[dllthomas]

"Do you see Apple spend time on checking their 'link profile' (new term I learned today)?"

Honestly, I'd be a little surprised if they didn't.