Maybe you are familiar with the fact that a webserver can see which browser version you’re using and for example also how big the window is you’re using to view that website. In itself that is interesting enough for some statistics on the visitors of your website.
But there is more, way more and that is where thoughts of privacy, but also of marketing and research potential come in to play. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made a website to show a bit of what is possible. (Go support them here, by the way.)
Well, of course the end of Search Engine Optimization is not near in a broad sense, but we could be well up for some “SEO, but not as we know it”, quite soon. Despite it being fairly successful, especially in recent times, I’ve always been skeptical about “pure SEO”. That is, SEO for just the purpose of doing SEO, optimizing your website just to look good in search engines. I’m not denying the value of good SEO, after all you want your nice articles and information to be found, but that is the point; nice information! All too often optimization tactics are used as a way of promoting content that is of little value as much as possible. In general I would say this applies to advertisements and advertorials, the value of this could be disputed, but way too often I’ve seen excellent SEO trying to drag me to a site with content that was just promotional and of no (other) value to me.