Is SEO immoral?
We search for relevance via the search engine. By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant. Thereby, wasting the user's time and resources. It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result.
Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?
Normally, I'd just leave a response on the Q+A site itself, but in this case, I felt the topic warranted some broader coverage. Let's start by dissecting the points of the question, then tackle the overarching theme.
"By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant."
This statement strikes me as fundamentally untrue. SEO, like any form of influence humans can have on one another, can be used for good or evil. The great part about SEO, in particular, is that using it to promote irrelevant results is, generally speaking, a fool's errand. I'll illustrate why:
SEO is almost never applied to make non-relevant results rank for unrelated queries. And, I'd go one step further, arguing that if white hat SEO didn't exist, millions of search results would be far worse, as fewer high quality, relevant results would make their content accessible to search engines and well-targeted toward queries.
Complaining about SEO in this fashion seems akin to complaining about demographic profiling in brand advertising. It may irk you that when watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, clever advertisers have figured out that you enjoy the delicious, salty cheesiness of Cheetos® snacks* and thus, interrupt Jon's witty banter with pictures and sounds about their product. However, a world without ratings metrics, profiling and advertiser savvy would almost certainly show you far less tempting commercials.
The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) attracts billions of investment dollars and massive amounts of marketers' energies to accomplish three key goals:
1. Determine what people are searching for and create content that serves them well
2. Make sites, pages and material accessible to search engines so they can display it when relevant searches are performed
3. Improve the ranking of already accessible pages so they draw in greater quantities of visitors
For more
We search for relevance via the search engine. By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant. Thereby, wasting the user's time and resources. It could be considered advertising in the form of a search result.
Is this misleading and counter to the public welfare?
Normally, I'd just leave a response on the Q+A site itself, but in this case, I felt the topic warranted some broader coverage. Let's start by dissecting the points of the question, then tackle the overarching theme.
"By learning and manipulating the system to accomplish its goal, SEO makes it more likely that you will come upon a target that is irrelevant."
This statement strikes me as fundamentally untrue. SEO, like any form of influence humans can have on one another, can be used for good or evil. The great part about SEO, in particular, is that using it to promote irrelevant results is, generally speaking, a fool's errand. I'll illustrate why:
Complaining about SEO in this fashion seems akin to complaining about demographic profiling in brand advertising. It may irk you that when watching Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, clever advertisers have figured out that you enjoy the delicious, salty cheesiness of Cheetos® snacks* and thus, interrupt Jon's witty banter with pictures and sounds about their product. However, a world without ratings metrics, profiling and advertiser savvy would almost certainly show you far less tempting commercials.
The practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) attracts billions of investment dollars and massive amounts of marketers' energies to accomplish three key goals:
1. Determine what people are searching for and create content that serves them well
2. Make sites, pages and material accessible to search engines so they can display it when relevant searches are performed
3. Improve the ranking of already accessible pages so they draw in greater quantities of visitors
For more
No comments:
Post a Comment