[Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability

[Marianne]

Good Morning All,

Actually, there is nothing random about the changes that the search engines
make. Relevance methodologies change so that the most relevant result based
on human behavior of some sort dictates the most "popular" result. When
smart folks learn how to "game" the methodology, the search companies
develop relevance mechanisms that block these workarounds. Link farms used
to be the order of the day, now they compare content on linked pages.
Doorway pages used to be the order of the day. Now they take non-text
information into account for relevance. It is like the Wiley Coyote/Road
Runner cartoons with the search engines beep-beeping their way ahead of the
black hat optimizer. 

I see that IA is a fundamental part of search optimization. In fact, I
believe that IAs are the best optimizers based on their skill sets of
information behavior, design, interaction, and such. I will attempt to make
that clear in my presentation.

marianne

-----Original Message-----
From: Brett Taylor [mailto:btaylor at roundarch.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 7:17 AM
To: Marianne; sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: RE: [Sigia-l] SEO versus Experience design versus usability

... What I found the struggles to be is, the search engines
randomly changed the way they spidered/indexed pages. Once month they
were doing this, the next something different so as developers we were
constantly chasing the ball ...

So now we are back to it and as in IA few are trying to drive how to
best do it vs, what Marianne explained here. I agree with her.
...

Instead of one trying to drive the wagon, maybe we should be about
sharing knowledge and all taking away with what they want vs. some
thinking one way is the only way.