Fox News: SEO? We don’t need no stinkin’ SEO!
Fox News has the slogan ‘fair and balanced’ emblazoned on its website. But there was little balance to be found in an analysis of search engine optimisation which appeared in its online technology section within an article entitled ‘3 reasons Google is Killing Internet Search’.
Describing the practice of search engine optimisation (SEO) as ‘corrosive’ the writer of the piece, John R. Quain, goes on to suggest that the Internet would be a much better place without SEO. Mr Quain claims that website optimisation: “…undermines Google’s original intent, namely to analyse the content of pages and websites, independently determine what those pages are about and deliver relevant results.”
According to the report, Google is somehow to blame for such rampant onslaughts of search engine optimisation, and is itself “drowning in a sea of SEO.”
In defense of SEO
So, where to start? Firstly, Mr Quain is partially right on one count – some SEO techniques might be seen as ‘corrosive,’ and certainly have contributed to website optimisation getting a bad press.
These underhand tactics are usually described as ‘black hat’ optimisation, and include keyword stuffing, link farming and junk content creation, amongst others. But what Quain fails to point out is that no professional and legitimate SEO agency would use such tactics to improve their clients’ rankings. To tar the entire practice with the same brush displays an ignorance of how essential, and useful, SEO is to the Internet and its users.
But the writer is insistent that all SEO is bad, and suggests that any attempt to make a website more appealing to search engines is a ruse that will lead to inaccurate search results. Which is completely untrue.
The role of an SEO agency is to make a website more appealing to search engines BY making it more relevant to appropriate search queries, and so is actually helping web users to find what they’re looking for. While website optimisation might be tainted by a few bad eggs, on the whole it is a positive force that helps to bring order into what would otherwise be billions of chaotically disordered web pages.
As to Quain’s assertion that Google’s popularity is the cause of SEO; the point he misses is that search engine optimisation is intended to optimise websites in a way that will produce the best results amongst all search engines. While many SEO professionals do focus on optimising for Google, that’s only because it’s the world’s most popular search engine and so will direct a higher proportion of traffic to their client’s websites.
One might also wonder what Fox’s own SEO experts thought about the piece.
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