'Lo again
I recently paid a visit to a certain SEO forum and had a look at the forums there.
Whilst reading the threads, I couldn't help but be shocked and appalled at the FUD being spread there.
To quote one (altered slightly, so you guys can't reverse-google for it ;) )
"...yeah, it also helps to copy your meta keywords into a h1 tag at the top of your page and hide it wiv jscript"
Naturally, that same person also seemed to have Mozilla and Firefox confused.
The site had a few articles on how "ethical seo" 'doesn't work', and activly promotes bad practices, non-semantics, and praises HTML4.01 Transitional because "it lets you do anything you want!"
There are claims that sites manually submitted to Google reduces your pagerank by a few points because it didn't find your site by being linked to it.
It also has some kind of "comparison" between "ethical SEO" (a website that complied with spec (but not semantics, it still used the <font> element and tables for layout, but it did validate), verses a "normal SEO" site (IE-DOM eat your heart out) and claimed that the latter site would get higher rankings in Google
So can I hear it from the experts (ie: you guys) what the truth behind SEO really is. Are semantics worth anything?
...Is it worth sinking so low as to use 302s on Googlebot and display: none; on "keyword paragraphs", what about "mini-linkfarms" (a <table style="display: none;"> (not a <ul>) full of hyperlinks to other pages on other sites full of similar content) just to get a slightly higher pagerank?
IMHO, ranking is more dependant on your brand strength, rather than dirty and underhand tricks. Besides, I thought Google was a "semantic web" bot.
Perhaps we should petition Google to produce a "Semantic Cralwer" that looks for a special HTTP Response Header or page <meta> telling the spider that the page is semantic and doesn't use any tricks.
Comments?
-- -David R ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
