Alpha Carter

This is crazy... the frame busting code on NYTimes.com breaks the ability to share sidewiki comments... so articles without comments (like the one i comment on below) cant be argued against. Thats why i published this gripe out here but commentary should always be allowed i would love the author or anyone else to talk with me about this...

in reference to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html

I’m an SEO guy so I’m always thinking about how Google ranks things by relevance and importance and there are a couple things you need to pay attention to in this article…
“For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.”
“Adam Raff is a co-founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm”

These two quotes make me believe that this is just another bitch from a website owner that doesn’t understand how or why Google penalizes sites but I will still run through the points he made and explain why Google has that behavior

If you use webmaster tools Google will tell you about imposed penalties and allow you to ask for reconsideration… the only reason Google doesn’t tell you if you are trying to game the results in an unfair way and giving you the information would allow you to manipulate the results more effectively. Google’s battle cry is “Don’t be evil” so the fact that they impose penalties is only to improve the quality of the results and help users experience. In fact Yahoo has the ability to promote some results to the top of the SERPS editorially (rather than through an algorithm) basically overriding their ranking system… Google doesn’t have this ability at all they can only impose penalties for spammy or unfair practices… The reason Google sites rank so well for their industries is not because they are put there but because they are doing users a great service and therefore they have massive linking profiles and tons of high quality links.

Now lets take on his point about “universal search”. Universal search helps the user experience… rather than punting users to another website of questionable trust and content they show you the best results right on the search page, effectively saving you a click. Bing does the same thing they show you the results that are relevant from a trusted source rather than sending you off to somewhere else of questionable value. Vertical search helps the user therefore Google implements the practice

And then there is a bitch about Tom Tom stock dropping… sorry that Google does so many things well and is kicking ass but if they have a better product it is totally fair that they put it out for users. Just because some other company is already doing something doesn’t mean that you cut all the other competition… are we going to stop Bing from truing their hand at overthrowing Google because Google already does so well?
Then he tries to bring in the FCC saying that we need “neutrality” just like we have the net neutrality fight going on right now… sorry they are a company providing a free service and they are trying to help the users not hurt them. Just because you company was hurt because they didn’t understand SEO and were probably engaging in unfair practices and breaking Google’s TOS

This is just another bitch session from a guy who doesn’t understand SEO and is complaining because he couldn’t figure out how to not be evil…


Im not affiliated with Google in any way (although id love to be they are a great company)… psst Google give me a job :)