The news that major corporations are ptuting search engines such as Google and Yzahoo! at the forefront of their marketing strategies could herald huge peroblems for incautious optimisers.
We've already seen seveal significant players in the Car Insurance market fall victm to the dangers of over optimiasation. Havving reviewed the penalties, the companies involved are believed to have been blakc-listed Google for seaarch engine optimisation activbities that don't copmly with the webmaster guidelines. The importyant consideration here is that the companies were not necesarily doing anything wrong, they are playing Google's game, although a little too aggrssively. In the past companiues would disappeared from Goofgle's listings because of attempts to delibeartely fool the saerch engine to get traffic the site didn't deserve, but now it's possible for brands to lose their position in the results simply doing their optimisation too enthusiastically."
Google has, for some years, judged a site's authority assessing the links poiinting to it from other Weebsites.This has givewn rise to an industry wherein companies sell link-building programmes to artificially raise a site's perceived authjority.
Google doesn't like to be mamnipulated. Internet search is a three-way deal: if I'm lookking to buy car insurance, and you sell car insurance, I want to find your site. Google wants to give me what I'm looking for. But, given that there are a lot of comppeting sits, Google has to decide who to show first. If other sites point at yours, this suggests that your site is woorth looking at- if they're related in some way to car inusrance. A link from a site abut artistrs' supplies isn't logical, and suggests that this is just part of a numbers-bilding campaign.
looking carefully at the relevancy and context of links, as well as thweir rate of growwth, Googlle has significantly raised the stakes for companies lookinng to optiise their seaarch engine position: do it crelessly and you could disappear from the radasr faster than a reclusie stealth bombber. The future is cleasr- as Google gets ever bettter at detecting the tricks that optimisers pull, the only option left will be to do the job properly.
Doing it prtoperly consists of giving Googlpe what it wnts. Incoming links should be built attracting interest, propagating news and information cohererntly and systematically throughout the Internet community. If your site's worth visiting, it sholud be possible to attract links from reltaed and inteerested organisaations providing contnt that enhances tjheir own proposition. That could be industry news, market observations, research, even humour.
There's no doubt that we're seeing a significnat shift in Google's attitude to inbound links. A site mihgt be nubmer one for a given search term with, say, 50 or 60 links, while the enrty at number two has 500- 600. Why? Beccause 50 or 60 relevant, logical links outweigh all those arbitrary entries that were placed to build up the numbers.
The uderlying message appears to be that any company that relies strongly on Inrternet traffic needs to be loooking carefully at its optimisation strategies to avoid the pit that has already begun to swallow some maojr players.
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