Battle of the Search Engines

It’s no secret that search engine operators don’t like people manipulating the results through optimization, but this is exactly what search engine optimizers (SEO’s) do. The majority of web searchers won’t know what search engine optimization is, how it is done, or even care much about it. All they care about is getting accurate results – these are the people who the search engines operators care about, not SEO’s. So they must, at all costs, ensure that the results they provide are genuine, not simply a manipulation of people optimizing their websites so they appear higher up the search engine results. However, so long as computer algorithms are used to generate the results, then there will always be ways of influencing the results. What search engine optimizers must do is move with any developments that arise from the search engines enhancing their algorithms to better detect obvious search engine optimization.

Over the past few years I’ve seen the search engines getting more and more strict toward search engine optimization, the infamous Florida update that happened in 2003 is proof enough. In this particular update a vast number of web pages that ranked at or near the top of the results simply disappeared overnight. No one outside of Google actually knows the definite reason why this happened, or why some web pages were dropped, while others remained. But what is thought is that web pages that displayed excessive search engine optimization were dropped or penalized. What this is definitely proof of is that the search engines don’t need our permission to change their algorithms, and can do so at any point without regard for how many sites it might affect. Therefore when performing SEO for a website we must be weary not only of what might get a website penalized now, but what could potentially get a website penalized in the future.

What is apparent is that search engine optimizers are having to become a lot more savvy in their website promotion tactics in order to avoid their website being penalized. Perhaps the easiest way of getting a website penalized is to target just one keyword or keyphrase in their link anchor text. Search Engines like natural linking, that is where a website links to another out of choice, so if a website has 100 inbound links that all have exactly the same anchor text, is that natural? No, quite the opposite, it’s highly unnatural. In order to avoid this pitfall, you should vary your link anchor text for each link partnership you set-up, or each time you submit to a web directory. If you’re smart about your link anchor text then there is no way your linking strategy will look unnatural. If possible always try to obtain one-way links. Link exchanges aren’t exactly a natural way of a website’s link popularity increasing.

Another important step to prevent being your website being penalized is to ensure you don’t over-optimize your website. That is to say don’t ‘keyword stuff’. Keyword stuffing is where you use your keyword or keyphrase over-and-over again in your web page in order to increase the keyword’s weighting in the body text. The search engines can spot deliberate over-optimization quite easily, and as a result, should be avoided. Usually if you write a well written, informative web page then there is no need to ‘optimize’ a web page as you will have naturally mentioned your keyword/phrase in the text. The only thing you should consider optimizing is the Title tag, this should always contain your primary keyword or phrase.

If you operate a new website and you get backlinks too quickly then this is often a clear sign of optimization tactics. Even worse, is the situation where all of these backlinks contain exactly the same anchor text (as previously mentioned). If you operate a new website you should build links slowly. As I’ve mentioned already, the search engines like to see natural linking, if your website is only a week old and already has 200 backlinks, is that natural? Link building should be a gradual process, and you should resist the urge to try to get thousands of links as soon as you launch your site. Although your intentions may be good, you may actually be doing more harm than good.

When you consider what the search engines are trying to enforce, it isn’t difficult to avoid being penalized, all you need is to do is practice some common sense. Don’t do anything that might look unnatural to the search engines.

It seems that the search engines are slowly tightening their grip on the search engine optimization world. Is this a bad thing? I’ll leave you to decide.