Search Engine Obfuscation

I imagine many of you realize this title means I’m about to take a poke at Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Probably not as many recall I’ve already written a post about this (May 13 2013).

Here’s a short quote from that post:

“No matter what you’re searching for or which search engine you use, what you get are never really the best matches. Many hits are there simply because their position was manipulated by Search Engine Optimization.”

Just in case you’re unfamiliar with SEO, it’s the process of improving the visibility of a website or page in a search engine’s results. While this may seem a reasonable goal for many a business, the service is available to everyone—for good or evil.

If you need to know more about what services SEO provides, take a peek at the obvious, www.seo.com. Of course, they (or any SEO provider) won’t tell you anything about the downside.

See here’s the thing, the dirty little secret no SEO provider or search engine ever talks about. If you improve one site’s visibility, you also decrease the visibility of every other site.

All search engines have strategies, even if implicit. They can be found, analyzed, and manipulated to a site’s advantage. Some strategies may be more complex than others, and some may be revised more often than others, but there’s always something to be finessed if they’re clever or finagled if they’re devious.

In case you doubt how often search engine strategies change, here’s a quote from seo.com: “Online marketing has developed beyond search engine optimization. At SEO.com our services have eVolved to keep delivering the results you want.”

Calling it evolutionary is deceptive. These services optimize for all the major search engines, and strategies are always changing. And if you (or your company) want to benefit from these services, you need to keep buying what they keep delivering.

Of course, your webmaster can buy the SEO books and do this in-house. Either way, once you’ve bought into SEO, the fear of dropping out grows like a cancer. Since the spread of SEO is inevitable, so is the increasing distortion of search results.

What the purveyors of SEO and search engines don’t say is it’s just like an escalating arms race. After all, the more search become obfuscated, the more money they make. Not from us. We get to search for free; and it’s worth what we pay for it.

Speed Is An Illusion

The Internet connects everyone and everything, but getting to the thing (or one) you want is sometimes more frustrating than having no access at all. The big roadblock on the Information Superhighway is the failure of search engines to retrieve efficiently.

They may look powerful, returning tens of thousands (or millions) of hits in fractions of a second. So what? That’s not how search speed should be measured. The clock shouldn’t stop until you’ve retrieved your information.

What counts is not how fast you get off the line (0-60), but how long it takes to get to your destination. Search engines give you a gargantuan haystack, but it’s up to you to dig in to find your particular needle. Showing you all these hits very, very quickly is barely the first step of a long journey.

To get where you want to go, you actually have to look at these hits. Often, you sit and wait and wait until a page loads. Search engine speed means nothing when it takes tons of your time to examine just a few pages. And you lose more time on pages that make you wonder what they have to do with your search.

The answer is in three letters: SEO. No matter what you’re searching for or which search engine you use, what you get are never really the best matches. Many hits are there simply because their position was manipulated by Search Engine Optimization.

SEO companies constantly pedal this service. Even Internet Service Providers push SEO. The goose keeps laying golden eggs because every search engine has different criteria and they keep changing them. If you merely want to maintain your place in the hit list, you must keep paying for new optimizations.

It’s legitimate for sellers of product X to want to show up higher in a search for that product. But optimization is being abused by companies selling Y and Z, not to mention a variety of Snake Oils! These irrelevancies only waste your time. They’re detours and potholes on your way to find product X. Encounter enough and you’ll never get there.