Quora do not want search engines to publish their content: its robots.txt blocks all indexable URLs, for instance http://www.quora.com/SEO.

User-agent: *
Allow: /$
Allow: /about/
Allow: /jobs
Allow: /challenges
Allow: /press
Allow: /login/
Disallow: /
Disallow: /log
Disallow: /*/log
Disallow: /home/global_feed

It is not a surprise that a growing upstart tries to stand alone without the tail wind that Google provides. Its very selling point to investors is the fact that its uptake of adoption by users is by the social media experience itself.

An interesting paradox of Quora is that it is a social media site posing as a search engine. Its founder believes that “more than 90% of the information people want to know is still not available on the web in a format that’s easy for them to quickly understand”.

Also common to search engines is the focus on dealing with the challenge of duplicated content. Central to Quora is its ability to merge questions to keep uniqueness of the content over time and across topics.

Since SEO is really about efficiently rotate the inventory of content in any database, a fascinating challenge for Quora itself would be to optimize content with the active contribution of its users.

Rupert Murdoch claimed that Mountain View redirects users from Google to the BBC web site: “The BBC has been paying US internet search engine Google for the right to use key words and phrases that put it on top of results lists. [...] The BBC paid Google so that people looking up details of the Mercury Prize, for instance, would be directed to a BBC website“. Is this SEO or SEM?

To put the claim in context, News Corp is embarked in a number of skirmishes against BBC for a share of the publicity market on TV in the UK and against Google to monetize the content of news site.

The news could be read as an entirely legitimate purchase of Adwords by the BBC. It is unclear whether paying to put the BBC on top of results for certain keywords is referring to any sort of SEO self-inflicting practice against Google’s own Terms of Service.

I carried out a quick research and the results suggest that SEM is not part of the BBC tactics:

1. The BBC is not buying the kws mentioned in the article, eg. Speech Debelle and Mercury Prize

2. The BBC is a notorious pinch-penny in Adwords spending.

The most plausible explanation is however that the piece of news was written by a journalist that either does not have a clue about the permanent tension between SEO and SEM, or that he/she knew all too well.

Just as I began to get used to search in delicious very much as I search in Google, I find that the service is getting pretty unreliable in the past few weeks.

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