Seat at the Table

One of my big frustrations with search engines is that for many topic the results are filled with sales links. Just type in “search engine optimization” and sure enough many of the results are for products and services.

So I turned to the Blogosphere and found some potentially sad news.

I searched on Technorati for “search engine optimization” to see what people were writing about…and all I seem to get are offers for various types of SEO services and technology.

I’m guessing that this is in large part due to the fact that sales and marketing tends to drive SEO. But what if PR did? Then perhaps we’d have more pages that were filled with real information in the right context being driven to the top of the rankings.

Search engines can also help. How about having search engines encouraging webmasters to tag pages as a product sale page versus information page. Those pages that use the tags would automatically get extra points in the index. Those that misuse tags (say, through a user vote) would get dinged bit time. This is probably easier than it sounds but something should be done…and it might be a good way to push back on Google’s market share a bit.

OK. Enough ranting. I’ll go try Clusty to get some real decent results.