Is the media helping or hurting our understanding of SEO?

July 25, 2008 |

CNET’s Stephen Shankland has written a thorough review of Microsoft’s BrowseRank, “Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank” but its this perspective that really tells the story.

It’s maddening to see yet another naive or deliberately misleading article on an innovation in search ranking, that perpetuates persistent misunderstanding of how search works and what makes search better.

Microsoft’s done some amazing work but make sure you take the hype with a grain of salt. Really understand how search engines work if you have any expectation of success as a search marketer. Ethan’s perspective is invaluable.

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Comments

2 Comments so far

kabonfootprint namin on August 18, 20084:08 pm
It’s maddening to see yet another naive or deliberately misleading article on an innovation in search ranking, that perpetuates persistent misunderstanding of how search works and what makes search better.
John Sylvester on August 20, 20085:59 am
CNET’s article states: “A big part of Google’s rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages.”

That’s not the reason people use Google. Who, outside the industry has ever heard of PageRank? All the major search engines rank pages according to a number of variables but not one of them uses page rank per se when calculating placement.

I really don’t understand where CNET’s article was going. It seemed like a lot of puff to me.