The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

Re:The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And... by byrneseyeview on Monday July 13, 2009 @08:42AM (#701568)

If you read his opening analogy without thinking it was a reference to SEO, you might assume it was about, say, books. I suspect that it's easier to get a web page read than a book distributed (if the author of the essay would like, we can have a race -- I will create a page and see if I can get it visited by a major search engine faster than he can get a book sold at a major chain).

Maybe Google isn't doing a good job. Maybe SEOs (like me) are manipulating search results in a way that's harmful to consumers. But in a capitalist economy, the way you say "That could be done better" is to, well, do it better. Or find someone who does it better, and use them instead of Google.

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Re:The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And... by trickjarrett on Monday July 13, 2009 @08:55AM (#701584)

Of course there are harmful SEOs, ones who play the system with malicious intent. However consider that there are malicious marketers, malicious politicians, and malicious forms of every other occupation. The government does not regulate [all of] these.

At some point the government has to let the people govern themselves rather than coddling and protecting them from themselves. Protecting from themselves leads to an unhealthy government / citizen relationship.

[Edited to clarify text, added text in []s]

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