I sincerely wish I had more time to write about this little phenomenon about backroom strategies used by the biggest companies in the country to spoil each others’ efforts unfairly. However, I’ve become SOOO busy with requests to look at websites to increase their rankings on Google (yes, can I repeat Google?) and other search engines because there’s never been a bigger need for SEO in history, it seems.
So, I subscribe to Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Adviser newsletter. I was reminded by another SEO professional to re-subscribe recently to her newsletter because she “highly recommended it.” She didn’t need to “recommend” it to me though because frankly, I’ve respected and appreciated Jill’s attitudes and philosophy about SEO from the first time I blogged about her in 2008. We share a similar philosophy about combatting spam and just doing ethical and intelligent business for our SEO clients. In the most recent edition of the newsletter, she pointed out how she was quoted by a mainstream newspaper: The Washington Post. I’ve been meaning to read it for a number of days, but finally got to the article after having literally a few seconds in between the next thing I have to do for the day and getting a bite to eat here finally at 7:07p. Yes, I haven’t even truly eaten breakfast or lunch yet.
After reading it and continuing to read word after word into the “article,” I realized it wasn’t an article, but rather a blog post. It started off as a personal anecdote by the “journalist” talking about his friend’s experience trying to replace her “big-box TV.” Probably worse than this, it could of even have been a strategic shot at Google to undercut the Search Engine given that the Chairman of the Post is on the board of Directors of Facebook. I’m sure the writer was going to get kudos from his boss up top for helping “dish” on Facebook’s rival in the Internet.
The sad thing is that they aren’t rivals in many ways. They have different purposes and more importantly, they can work together. As I’ve mentioned already, “Facebook” and it’s different search iterations are the #1 keyword/phrase(s) on Google. It’s because of Google that Facebook was much more readily found. It’s true there are plenty of “spammy” results in the best search engine in the world, but just like there is still spam, there are salespeople, advertisements and many things we don’t need in our faces daily. Nevertheless, they exist and we allow them to exist.
When this millenium started, one great thing that came with the start was a MUCH better search engine. It took 2 of the best brains to honestly create what many others before them failed to do: build a very useful website that gives us for the most part what we want online. Of course, over the span of this past decade plus while the employees of this behemoth of a search engine have been vesting their stock options and probably less motivated in working as hard as they did in growing their product in the earlier years, it’s still the best search engine in the world. Unfortunately, Facebook relies on Bing – which still has a long way to go and will probably stay that way until Microsoft decides “search” is it’s main product. I’ve ranted already plenty about how we shouldn’t “jump on the facebook bandwagon” quite yet because frankly, there are still too many “wrong things with it” when it comes to serving the same purposes that google does.
Yes, I can agree that Facebook is becoming a much more significant player in the Internet now given all it’s traffic, but we’re not losing the “battle on spam.” We haven’t even got close to being as spammy or as sad as the Internet once was. Plus, are we saying that Twitter and Facebook are creating a bunch of very profound and very useful messages??? Are we saying that these social networks are creating very high quality content? Please admit it’s a bunch of personal opinions and for the more serious crowd, we need references and “serious articles” to back up claims; not Bob’s opinion on which superstore has a great deal on the “big box TV.” It’s great that Bob’s opinion works 1 out of 10 times and you happened to hear his 10% gem, but frankly, we go to reliable sources we find, research and bookmark.
There’s an idea: how about some bookmark function in Facebook? There’s a story that the Washington Post can write about and not be biased.
**Frankly, this hasn’t been edited and I know there’s lots of errors here along with the fact this is a rant. I didn’t have the full day or week Rosenwald had to write his story in the Post.
