On 9/13/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 13/09/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
My heart bleeds for them. Really.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=...
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=...
"Companies are wasting some of the millions of dollars spent each year to improve their visibility and ranking in search engines such as Google and Yahoo"
"Wikipedia should carve out an area on each page where brand managers can respond in an official capacity." - we do - it's called the Talk page
http://adage.com/article.php?article_id=111747
"the Wikipedia open-source phenomenon looms large right where companies are increasingly spending billions of dollars to jockey for position: on search-engine results pages."
Forgive my ignorance, but how do you spend billions on search engine optimisation? Who's ripping off these companies? In any case, doesn't Google improve its search algorithms as people get better at fooling them?
If you have millions to spend on something like that, why not spend it on making your website more useful and attractive? Or maybe make it easier to find the things you want? For a company with physical stores, the main reason I visit their websites is to check the hours on a local store, or to find a local store. That generally takes hunting around the small print, and then clicking a couple times. And that after waiting for all the flashy animation to load...and I have about as fast a connection as any average person.
Wikipedia is more useful for getting basic information about companies. If you don't want your customers seeing the good and the bad, one would think the place to start is on their own websites... but no, they want to spend their money fooling search engine algorithms. Are all companies run by idiots, or just most of them?