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. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.
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. . .
I think there’s a difference between a). telling all your friends about a website, and linking to it from your Facebook page, and b). methodically visiting random blogs and social media sites, and inserting a link to the target website into every comment thread. Given that SIAI is asking for volunteers, I assume they mean the latter. Even if it’s an accepted business practice, doesn’t mean that it’s honest or fair. In fact, just recently I saw a bot doing the same thing on Less Wrong, and it’s gone now, so I assume it got banned...
I’ll repeat myself: There is a middle ground between those two extremes. Posting links at random is not an acceptable practice anywhere credible!
What is acceptable is setting up linking networks between associates and cooperating organizations, among other things. If you think SIAI is worth paying attention to, you can get a lot more done by mentioning it on your blog than by just bringing it up in conversations with your close friends occasionally.