yew comments on Rationality Quotes December 2011 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (577)
Eh. SEO has a bad reputation among the general population, but from a business perspective it's generally recognized as a necessity, if a somewhat distasteful one. SEO doesn't just include throwing together garbage pages to fool Google. (I haven't actually read the guides linked on that page, so can't comment on them specifically.)
Given that they're searching for volunteers, it makes more sense to appeal to the general population than to business people, doesn't it? (As a non-business-person, certain practices in SEO sound to me much like Dark Arts, though they exploit misfeatures of search engines' (rather than human minds') algorithms.)
I wouldn't say so. For one thing, there's a substantial overlap between "business people" and "the general population," especially the portion of the general population that's likely to take volunteering for SIAI seriously in the first place.
A lot of "white hat" SEO is just a matter of making the connection between search engine algorithms and what's actually being looked for. Appropriately tagging pages to associated them with relevant subjects, asking people who are genuinely fans of your site to link to it on their site, making yourself visible on the social web, etc. . .