SEO is like ad-tech, a net negative to our society. There's no white-hat SEO, in the same way that there's no unintrusive ad tech.
The sell to clients was that there was no magic snake-oil involved, it was:
1. Make your website easy for Google to digest (which could involve some dev work, fixing bugs and markup, speeding up sites, mobile websites)
2. Understand what your market is and what they might be after (which led to a lot of analytical work)
3. Make quality content that makes you an authority (which involves content strategy, and cross-sells into copy and creative)
4. Properly promote your content for backlinks (the agency had a lot of success with promoting creative pieces to sites with strong link equity, such as Daily Mail Online etc.)
SEO is a dirty term, but a strategy for creating what is useful and can actually strengthen brands isn't evil.
One reason google is an effective search engine is society has incentives to make their stuff findable. It’s not just magic algorithms. The perception of Google’s quality is as much because we all know when we write an article how to make informative titles and content, and knowledge if we’re too spammy we’ll be punished. Eventually black hat SEO suffers in the long run.
I work in search, and one huge reason a given companies enterprise or site search sucks is because content authors don’t care about making their content findable by search. A search system is a series of social incentives to make attractive, findable search results, not just technology.
Errr, I personally hate the top articles google presents me for pretty much every query. Keyword stuffed long-winded texts that hide the information they are promising in the headline somewhere in multiple irrelevant paragraphs or just don't provide it at all. To me, Google's perceived quality has fallen significantly over the past five years.
Who decides what is the 'best' product? If advertising were illegal then how do people find out about products? Seems to me if advertising were illegal there would be no free market.
Impartial consumer advocacy groups comparing products on open, fair and repeatably measurable factors, for one.
> If advertising were illegal then how do people find out about products?
Same way people found out before advertising existed: word-of-mouth, trade fairs, product catalogs... and the question is always, does the world NEED the new product?
Is it beneficial for society if supermarkets carry literally dozens of different brands of simple plain white yogurt, of which half goes to waste because people mostly buy the cheap white label stuff?
Do we actually even need brands as a society? For many common goods the brand is actually irrelevant already. Think HDMI cables - as long as it carries a legal certificate that it conforms to HDMI specs, I don't care if the cable is from Amazon, Mediamarkt, or whatever the name of the Alibaba or ebay shop is. And I won't have any benefit from shelling out 10k bucks for a 20m cable over one that costs 20 bucks.
As societies, we definitely need to have a proper democratic debate and vote on how we want to (re)shape the relationship between consumers and producers. The current way is unsustainable.
I didn't downvote your comment but here's a fyi about the pervasiveness of advertising if you didn't already know...
Trade fairs are actually a form of "advertising". For example, a trade show selling a 10ft-by-10ft booth is essentially selling a 100 sqft "ad slot". The "ad inventory" for sale is the whole trade show floor. When companies spend money for a trade show booth, they categorize it in their financial accounting as "marketing budget".[0]
Product catalogs are often partially funded by sponsors that are featured in the catalog.
As for "word of mouth", the 1st person that started the chain of recommendations was often exposed to advertising.
[0] https://www.thetradeshownetwork.com/trade-show-blog/the-8-ma...
Modern advertising h(a)unting us wherever and whenever we go is a fairly modern innovation, but society and regulations have not caught up with it by far. Widespread influencer marketing for anyone but ultra-big brands able to buy product placements in movies would have been beyond unimaginable until the advent of smartphones where every tiny hotel has the opportunity to have global reach for, essentially, paying a flight and the cost of the stay for the influencer.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Targeted advertising is also something that only got possible and mass-affordable in the last two decades, and the mechanisms that make it work are deeply cutting into everyone's privacy. It isn't actually even possible any more to live any kind of modern life without your data ending up at the big tech companies' silos to be mined for ads - have a brick-style cellphone and give the number to a friend? Facebook and Whatsapp, as well as Google, now know your name and phone number. Order something online? The cloud provider hosting the (mail) infrastructure of the shop has your data and knows what you've ordered. These days one can't even go "offline shopping" anymore as the tape-backed gross quality anti-theft cameras got replaced by HD or 4K capable sensors with backend infrastructure that enables real time face identification and motion tracking, probably even eye tracking now, to watch your every blink while strolling through the aisles.
Thanks to modern open source libraries I can probably throw together a MVP store tracking system in a day or two. This kind of tracking is a commodity now, in a total free-for-all world, and aside from GDPR society hasn't had any kind of debate on that. And that's just the stuff that you literally cannot evade - the things people do willingly in exchange for reward programs, cashbacks and the likes are even more encompassing.
Also, the supermarket analogy falls short when the number of "products" is extremely large and you rely on search. Seems more like the equivalent of going to a very large supermarket in the dark with a flashlight.
At some point, someone has to market, advertise, or convince someone else that their product or service is worth the other person’s time, money, and space. Whether or not it’s between grocery store and brand, or brand and consumer, it’s still advertising/marketing.
Of course, it can be taken too far, but with rules such as requiring objectively true disclosures, we can strive to strike a balance.
The problem is between advertising and inconsistent/misleading studies, you cannot trust any person, product or company at this point and imho the system itself will fall over eventually and there will be restrictions and regulation that follows.
If we want accountability, then we should demand transparency. Data should be posted online so that it can be vetted and double and triple checked.
For the most part minimal government with restrictions on corporations to ensure the most broad transparency and limited collective "rights" would be best IMHO. I consider myself a pragmatic libertarian. A lot of people equate that with being Corporatist or anti government.
I just feel that most people would be better off finding private solutions for the most part. Any time a large corporation and/or governments get involved it feels more likely to end up for the worse. The driver being when corporate bodies and politicians lie.
Can you really not think of any way?
From vendors shouting out a list of their wares in a physical marketplace?
>the same way people that block all ads find out
From friends who don't block ads? How will this work?
So, as they did in stone age? Ads have been around for as ling as there has been commerce.
We live and function within an attention economy. Advertisement funded business models can only compete for our attention. Preferential attachment leads to power law distribution of activity. The mathematical result is called laissez faire, "winner takes all", fads, last stage capitalism, "the free market".
Agree that advertising should be illegal.
A conclusion that tortures me.
I worked on recommenders for a fashion retailer. As a consumer, I desparately want help finding the products just for me. As an insider, trying to address my own wants and desires, I couldn't even sell "a shirt that fits" to myself. Because in practice, recommenders are just another mirror, filter bubble, echo chamber, preferential attachment redux.
If I'm ever presented with a recommendation (advertisement) which satisfies a need -- fashionable, technical, practical, whatever -- it's little more than an accident.
Oh well.
Maybe the "personalization" craze will fare better.
Meanwhile, I soldier on with my foraging skills.
In their place, I want to see (and would pay for) high quality 3rd party product benchmarking, testing, and reviewing.
In other words: sticking to the spirit of the law, not the letter.
It's true that SEO in isolation is a bit pathological on its own — it should always be thought as a part of a broader UX strategy.
The latest trend is to simply rent subdomains or directories on large websites (newspapers, magazines, tv stations), including header/footer links from the main page. Works like a charm, whatever you publish there will rank like crazy because of the massive links the main page gets.