Promoting a site for Google requires a different tack than promoting a site for human viewers. Google is getting better at determining a site’s worth all the time. They update their algorithms multiple times a day, with major changes happening roughly once a month. This is good news. Every change in Google’s search protocol means that they are getting better at learning what your site is about and figuring out which search queries best match your content. They are getting a clearer view of the real value of your site.
Imagine you own a store that sells leather jackets, a real one with walls and a door, and you name it ‘The Hard-Wear Store’ to be edgy. Let’s say people in your town aren’t that bright, and they get the wrong idea. They visit your store looking for hammers and nails, light bulbs and ladders. Every time a new customer comes through the door, you make a tally mark on a piece of paper. You’re doing great, according to the tally sheet. You’ve only got 10 people a day coming in to check out your leather jackets, but 20 more people coming in to look for hardware stuff. 30 people a day, that’s great! You start to promote your store, claiming you are entertaining 30 customers a day, three times what a normal leather jacket store gets. Even the mayor stopped by your store last week (looking for lug nuts, but that’s not important).
This is not a terrible situation, provided you are the leather jacket dealer. You’re wasting some of your energy getting the wrong kind of customers, but maybe some of them decide to get leather jackets while they’re at your store. But what if you are the owner of a hardware store in the same town and you’ve been seeing fewer visitors since they started getting confused by the new store? What if you own another leather jacket store, and everyone in town only knows about ‘The Hard-Wear Store’ even though you carry the coolest fringed jackets around? The internet’s not a zero-sum game, there are enough customers and links out on the internet for everyone. But there is a good reason Google doesn’t want people knowing their exact search algorithm. They want a clear picture of the internet to give the best results for searchers. When you fake it, like a leather store pretending to be a hardware store, you help muddy the internet waters.
In the early days of the internet, nobody was designing sites or creating links for the benefit of robots. Good sites on the net were popular because they had visitors that told their friends and linked to them on their own websites. Bad sites fell by the wayside without visitors or links from other sites. The internet got big enough that ‘survival of the fittest’ could hardly last. Businesses realized how valuable the internet was and how lucrative it could be to be on top of Google rankings even if users weren’t spontaneously linking to your site or visiting on their own. Thus SEO, and an arms race between optimizers and search engines, started.
Manual action on spam (generally removal of spam sites from Google’s cache) through 9/2012 from Google’s ‘Fighting Spam’ page inside their ‘How Search Works’ site. Blue data points are for ‘Pure Spam’. Taken from http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/fighting-spam.html
SEOs often lament algorithm changes since it makes their jobs harder, but I welcome them. Every step gets us closer to a spam-free internet. It’s a little scary for those people whose jobs are to get sites higher in the rankings, but also means that interesting, popular content may soon be king again. The idea of an internet where the interesting and useful are top dog makes me happier than a kid at Christmas. The idea of millions of useless link network sites lying around the internet, created in a hurry simply to push a Thai Cialis company’s rankings up one spot makes me sadder than piles of wrapping paper the day after.
The secret ingredients in marketing a site for real people and the Google of the future are talent and patience. Unfortunately, these two traits have been absent from traditional SEO since it’s inception. You need a good product, good content, and a good site to be popular. This takes talent. You also need for people to realize what you have is worthwhile. This takes patience. Here’s hoping we can find some of both in our SEO work.
Joe Dawson works and writes for Printing Peach, a Canadian customer-service focused company that specializes in printing, web design, and SEO/SEM.