Economist - Dancing with Googles Spiders

[ShandyKing]

A nice article regarding SEM and Google can be found in the Economist this month. Most interesting, it writes “In 2005 worldwide spending on such “search-engine optimization’ (SEO), grew 125% to $1.2 billion, according to SEMPO… It predicts spending will grow by 150% this year”

That’s great news for all you SEO consultants!

The article also discusses the various Google dances “such as Bourbon, Gilligan and Florida”. It is also written how SEO’s love the fight with Google to achieve that top ranking position.

Here are some fun quotes for those of you who wont get this mag.

“Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google who is assailed with algorithm questions at industry conferences, says his firm like its competitors, carefully controls access to its secrets. ‘A lot of our best ideas don’t get filed as patents because patents eventually become public”.

“The most powerful determinant of a webpage’s importance is the number of incoming referral links, which is regarded as a gauge of the site’s popularity.”

“Unethical methods, known as ‘black-hat SEO’, including renting links from popular or long established sites (their links carry more weight). Some unscrupulous SEO outfits even exploit loopholes in website-managements tools to place hidden links on prestigious sites, such as those maintained by universities”.

Then the articles talks about cloaking scraped sites and keyword stuffing.

Looks like SEO is becoming a household word and the world seems to be paying attention to this little corner; the WSJ reporting on internal spats among forum members and now this international magazine that deals with macro world issues.

[Chris Boggs]

I agree shandy...very nice to get some "legitimate" press. Now can you tell me about the WSJ article regarding "forum spats?" I would love to read that one...