Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Does SEO Help Or Hurt User Experience



Jeremy Schoemaker, who runs the popular Shoemoney blog, wrote a post about a year and a half ago called “Where My Hatred of SEO Comes From“. It’s basically about site owners who put more effort into pleasing the search algorithms than pleasing users. Given the impact Google’s Panda update has had on a lot of sites, the topic of discussion seems as relevant as ever.



Would you make a change to your site if you knew it would help you in search, but your users would hate? Let us know in the comments. And if you find this topic interesting, why not share it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.



Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this article belong to those who expressed them, and do not necessarily reflect those of WPN.



On the one hand, the update is aimed at getting sites that do provide a quality experience ranked better, but on the other hand, it’s sent sites into a frenzy trying to appease Google’s algorithms.



We had a conversation with Schoemaker about search quality and site quality, as well as one with Atlas Web Service owner and President Michael Gray, whom Schoemaker referenced in his original article as having turned off the comments on his blog, as being an example of worrying more about search than users.



“I think its a big mistake to completely turn off blog comments,” Schoemaker tells WebProNews. “I recently switched ShoeMoney.com over to Facebook comments.  In doing so I lost a TON of user generated content.  Over 140,000 comments  in all and now they are down probably 80-90%.  The ones that are now are 100% real people and since their name is attached there are real conversations and discussions taking place.”









Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. Through Internet Marketing he places his name on great search engine like-GOOGLE who is also called as Innovator, Investor, Internet Marketing Guru and Entrepreneur. For more updates don’t go away, please stay with us.


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