Bury my rant on the Internet.
Back when the Internet was called the “World Wide Web” — yes kids, we had TV back then — there wasn’t much talk of “search engine optimization.” Now SEO is a booming little industry, manipulating algorithms to pull brands and products to the top of the results page. It was of course inevitable that the SEO business use the same infotechnology to bury negative news stories and opinions that companies don’t want people to find.
MSNBC reporter-blogger Bob Sullivan writes about one SEO company that promises to “displace” even negative “problem sites” like ConsumerWebWatch.org, the online home of Consumers Union and Consumer Reports magazine. Not surprisingly, the consumer advocacy group takes issue with business that gets paid to push their independent product reviews down into the clutter.
"Trying to make a buck by burying legitimate information that consumers can use to make a decision, that's a problem," says ConsumerWebWatch’s director. "If everybody games the system, then search engines will become not much more than yellow pages."
There’s a problem with this problem, however. It suggests that Internet search engines should somehow act in the interests of the end user — that a defenseless citizen Googling a word or two should be rewarded with the most relevant, accurate and contextual results. But that’s not how it works.
Relevance is not the Internet’s obligation. It’s a commodity that’s bought and sold, manufactured and manifested out of thin air. And everybody with an agenda — from legitimate researchers like Consumer Reports to those wacky kids who made searching the word “failure” result in a link to President Bush’s official bio — is trying to exploit the same Internet as everybody else.
There’s a dentist with my name in California. With enough effort he could push me out my own search results. People looking for Scatterbox might instead get six pages back of root canal pictures and spitting games. Then I’d retaliate, driving my stuff back to the top and burying his award-winning white paper on gum disease. Back and forth, back and forth.
Then some guy with our same name will marry Paris Hilton. Hundreds of links about the happy couple will jump over our stuff to the top of the search pages without even trying.
Sure. There will always be people who take what their search engines give them. They might even believe that the first thing listed is the most credible or important. These are probably the same people who think Rush Limbaugh is a journalist and who have never set up their voice mail.
The majority of Internet users, however, will figure this out. They’ll learn to use search engines to find what they need, and they’ll know when something’s been front-loaded to get their attention. They’ll come to trust certain web sites, blogs and moderated search services to point them to what they – not the invisible forces behind the Internet – think is most relevant. They’ll rely on watchdog groups and news media to expose hidden online identities and scams.
The modern Internet user will evolve to game the Internet right back.
Over time, I suspect this will make search engine optimization one of those quaint first-generation information age terms that used to mean something more significant. Like World Wide Web.
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- MSNBC Bob Sullivan blog | Companies’ online reputations scrubbed clean
- Google Blog | Googleboming “failure”
