Pavlov’s SEOs
Posted by Melanie Phung on Friday, October 28, 2005 at 5:47 pm
It’s been shown that once animals understand what they are supposed to do to receive a reward, rewarding them irregularly rather than consistently is much more effective in reinforcing that behavior. Animal behavior studies have shown that some animals who are rewarded inconsistently for pushing a lever (for example) become obsessed with that behavior… As opposed to the test subjects that were rewarded consistently — those animals behave more rationally.
This explains some web marketers’ obsessions with algorithm updates and their rankings. As long as the engines keep them guessing, SEOs will keep pounding away at that lever.
P.s. The term “algoholic,” to described algorithm-obsessed SEOs, was coined by Shari Thurow of Grantastic Designs and made its national debut, I believe, at San Jose’s Search Engine Strategies conference.
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