And maybe it is this "arms race" issue that is at the core of the SEO problem. If you are a startup with SEO that just happens to intersect with that of a very large well-established organization you might as well not exist.
Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".
Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.
Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks who had sites black listed by them.
If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.
I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.
Maybe Google can fix this by splitting their search page into a top section of top SEO sites and a lower section for "the road less travelled".
Just thinking out loud here. I've seen neat sites with very useful and relevant content not show-up anywhere useful in a Goggle search.
Then there's the "evil" element. I'll call it inadvertent evil to be kind. If you've ever had the experience of having, for example, Google reject your site for the AdSense program with pretty-much a totalitarian approach to the issue you'll know exactly what I mean. I've had that happen and it was beyond frustrating. It took months to deal with it. No way whatsoever to engage with Google to figure out what was wrong. I've heard even worst stories from folks who had sites black listed by them.
If we, by extension, call Google a "totalitarian regime" that, without a doubt, has the power to decide what can succeed and fail on the web, I think that the issues created by such things as SEO algorithms are amplified.
I don't want to go to the "Google is evil" extreme --they are not-- but some aspects of their robotic approach to dealing with the massive tasks they undertake definitely have the potential to become auto-evil-ized.