Q. I have read your article on the ethics of SEO and found it to be excellent and informative. I do have a question though: Is there a site to report a page or pages that are blatantly breaking the rules of a particular engine? I realize that the engine will most likely locate them eventually, but is there some place I can go to tell the engine or is there some regulating body? Thank you for your help and information.
- Chris Gurley, Data Recovery Clinic
A. Glad you liked the article. Most engines do have a way to report spam. It can usually be found at each engine under their spam policy or in their site map. Some examples:
http://www.alltheweb.com/info/about/spam_policy.html
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Sometimes, the engines do not locate them eventually- so your question is worthwhile. It's up to each individual engine, however, as to how fast they will act or if they will act (with regard to a reported spam incident).
9 December 2002
Q. Why do you provide free info on SEO?
A. SearchEthos provides info on practices and resources we respect because of three main reasons:
1. There's a lot of misinformation about what SEO is- particularly what effective SEO consists in. And there have been both mistakes and bad practices in the industry. Here, we can offer a different perspective with referenced resources to back up what we believe.
2. A more usable, better-designed internet benefits all of us. By posting information publicly (and free of charge), we're hoping that these basic SEO practices will become more standard than rare. If this enables greater visibility and relevance, the entire internet community benefits.
Besides, even if you're already a good researcher and over time, can come up with the same information and experience we've accumulated, chances are you'll never have unlimited time to keep up to date with both best practices and techniques that capitalize on the changing algorithms from the search engines.
We've been doing this intensely since 2000 and we're good at it. (See our Services.)
Would it surprise you to know that:
#1: the Best SEO practices are simple in theory but difficult to execute.
Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two separate things. A lot of the assistance we provide to our clients is a combination of instruction and actual execution of proven techniques that work.
#2: many companies fail to execute simple tactics such as market research, quality reviews, usability design, search usability design, etc. that would significantly improve their websites and user experiences. In practice, this means there's still plenty of work to go around. Especially for small consulting groups such as ourselves.
Last, SEO truly is a specialized field of information and expertise. As long as the search engines continue to evolve algorithms for relevancy (and methods of weeding out manipulated false relevancy), there will be a need for specialists such as SearchEthos to keep current with the ever-changing data and translate it into meaningful practices.