Newsweek Magazine has a write-up in the December issue about the world of SEO (talk about mainstream coverage!). Quote:
[Search engines] deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular. But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or “white hat” SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site. … It’s good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google’s index, while improving SEO rankings.
Matt Cutt’s, the Google employee interviewed for the story, has some additional information in this blog post. It seems, Google was already aware of the “black hat” SEO featured in the story, and actually used them as an example in a workshop, just days before the story appeared!
December 15th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
hehe, I love how Matt Cutts dissects Rand’s SEO efforts and points out that the links he bought are a joke :p
(no offense rand!)
December 16th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
none taken… They’re obviously working, so I can’t complain.
BTW - I pointed out a good number of errors in the article (they had to rush to press and didn’t call for fact-checking as normal).
December 20th, 2005 at 9:22 am
Over the past year I have really focused on SEO and it is a whole other job altogether. You have to be a jack of all trades to make it in this industry I think and SEO is a big part of making or breaking your site or a clients.