Re: Win By Ethics

Though I'm about to comment on your points, note that I disagree with none of them. I guess I'm just annotating or something :)

> That said I do find some of the claims on what is and isn't ethical for
> search engines ever so slightly frightening. Not because I'm doing it (I'm
> not), but because I'm left wondering who appointed some people as the
> global Internet-police of how other people design their own web sites.

I had a very creepy sensation that Google was censoring me and my site after MSN indexed it in no time flat without even being told of its existence. I was wrong, but the paranoia remains. Google is a great tech company, and I use their services, but I'm afraid they might have already become the next Microsoft. God, I'm praising and disparaging Microsoft in the same paragraph. Times they are a'changing.

> Moving back to my core point: Chapter 9 of Search Engine Positioning by
> Fredrick Marckini lists 12 red flags for spamdexing. None of them are
> "having a crappy web site". (Keyword stuffing is, but as the
> book is copyright 2001, it is identified as a losing strategy 4 years
> ago).

The site in question (begintosell.com) is stuffing big time. Any human reader can tell that another human didn't write this page.

> Chapter 38 of the same book talks about the search engine's real cardinal
> sin which is presenting one page to the search engine and another to users
> (cloaking or IP redirection). You get comments about why they don't like
> it and what action they'll take (the word "ban" is common) from
> Lycos, Excite, Hotbot, and references to similar comments from Altavista
> and Inktomi.

I've heard of sites doing this to the extreme that they present a different page to each of the different search engines. This is known in the programming world as wasted optimization. Begintosell.com doesn't seem to be presenting different pages to different viewers, though a site generator such as this one could do it easily.

> So what's my point? In my opinion.

> 1. It's your site, design it how YOU want.

> 2. As a practical matter, spamdexing and cloaking are not in my opinion
> the right strategy. Not because some self-appointed Internet-police tell
> you not to, but

> (a) because it produces a site that many users may hate,

I almost laughed when I looked at it.

> (b) because I don't think it will work - search engines already know how
> to ignore a lot of crap, and are getting better and better and it.

I bet it'll work for years. However...

> (c) Crap sites rarely get any incoming links - see below.

> 3. What really matters is building a site that people will link to (both
> for position in the search results, and for direct traffic thru the
> links). If you have a strategy for getting lots of sites to link to you,
> that helps a lot. If you don't, at least build a site that people will
> want to link to, and that specialist directories will list. (Which again
> is a reason not to build a crap site).

The wisdom at the moment is to get a few high-quality incoming links, not a whole lot of lousy ones. A high-quality link is eomthing like dmoz.org. It might be tempting to think that getting a link from ANY site with more traffic than yours is a good link, the search engine might actually be thinking "Oh, that site had potential, but now this well-known crap site is linking to it, too bad."

> 4. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: If you see a crap site in the total few results
> at a search engine, you shouldn't view that as a problem - but as an
> opportunity.

> If you build a good site, on a similar topic, you should eventually be
> able to outrank them.

This could be a great strategy. I'll file this away with all the market research, Overture, etc.

> - Your new quality site will be recognized by search engines as such (and
> if not now, sooner or later as they improve their recognition of site
> quality), and their crappy site will be recognized for what it is.

> - Your new site's link popularity should be going up (as more people link
> to your good site), and theirs will generally be going down (as people
> remove links to the crap site)

This is a much slower process than glacial recession. However, we all have to think about long-term investing.

> ...And I didn't need any guardians of the search results to tell me that.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think you're saying that ethical thinking naturally leads to a good site, because trying to cheat the engines will cause a backlash.

What about the original topic of a generated site? Assume that it creates a site with lots of quality content that people actually want to read, as is claimed by that software I bought but haven't tried yet (it harvests articles from free submission sites).

From what I'm reading, most of the people on this forum would have no problem with that. As long as there is quality content, it doesn't matter where it comes from or how it gets where it's going. Automation is great, as long as there are happy visitors and everything is spam-compliant and such.