Marketing Through Search Optimization
How to be found on the Web
by Alex Michael and Ben Salter
243 Pages, Softcover, $19.77
Published 2003, Republished 2005
I wish I had some good things to say about this book, but I really don’t. More than anything it reads like a historical document as opposed to offering any fresh ideas on search engine’s or search engine marketing. Rife with outdated technologies and solutions, this book is in dire need of an update, not just a republishing.
I spent most of my time skimming through this book looking for anything currently relevant on the search engine landscape. I did find their discussion of the “engine behind Google’s search technology”.
PigeonRankTM… is a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. Brin argued that low-cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms.
You can read more about PigeonRank on Google’s website. Unlike the authors of this book, who appear to take PigeonRank at face value, you might want to read the small print at the bottom of the page:
Note: This page was posted for April Fool’s Day – 2002.
I’ll concede that the above note may not have been on the page back when this book was published, it was common knowledge in the SEO community that this was, in fact, an April Fool’s prank.
Marketing Through Search Optimization does provide a pretty detailed narrative of the history of search engines, in general. Though one must take that with a grain of salt once you consider the depth of research that was put into the PigeonRank section.
In all, the strategies listed nothing new or that isn’t readily available for free online. Some of their methods cross the line into spamming territory, though they also concede that too much of certain practices are likely to get you banned.
Finally, the end of the book lists a number of tools of the trade. Many of them might be helpful tools, on the current SEO landscape, however many of them are simply spam generators, some of which have been singled-out by Google as such.