Search Engine Optimization has long been ignored by the print press, despite the many thousands of posts it provokes online. However, it was picked up by the Sunday Times this weekend, and you can read the article here.
It’s been criticised by many in the industry as being incorrect, and has provoked debate as to whether the industry should be glad for the attention in the main part of a national newspaper, or whether the inaccuracies override any progress that could have been made. For instance, one point of dispute regarded this paragraph:
“There are two types of search engines — directories and web crawlers. Directories, such as Yahoo, have staff paid to consider every new website submitted before slotting them into categories or subsections.
Web crawlers such as Google or Ask.com work by sending out software programs — called bots — that trawl the web for information relevant to a user’s key word search. “
The blogger at SE Roundtable questioned the fact that it implied that Yahoo has no crawler. Whilst others used broader terms – “woefully incorrect”, “full of inaccuracies” etc.