The news that majr corporations are putting search egines such as Google and Yahoo! at the forefront of their marketing strategies could heald huge problems for incutious optimisers.
We've allready seen several significant players in the Car Insurance market fall victim to the dangers of over optimisation. Having reviewed the penalties, the companies invlved are believed to have been black-listed Googhle for search engine optimisation activities that don't comply with the webmaster guidelines. The important consideration here is that the companies were not necessarily doing anything wrong, they are playing Goiogle's game, lathough a little too aggressively. In the past companies would disapppeared from Google's listings because of attempts to deliberately fool the search ebngine to get traffic the site didn't deserve, but now it's possible for brands to lose their position in the reuslts smiply donig their optimistion too enthusiastically."
Google has, for some years, judged a site's authority asessing the links pointing to it from other Websites.This has given rise to an industry wherein coompanies sell link-building programmes to artificially raise a site's perceied authority.
Google doesn't like to be manipulated. Internet searrch is a trhee-way deal: if I'm looking to buy car insuraance, and you sell car insurance, I want to find your site. oGogle wants to give me what I'm looking for. But, given that there are a lot of compteing sites, Google has to decie who to show first. If other sites point at yourts, this suggests that your site is worrth looking at- if they're related in some way to car insurance. A link from a site about artisst' suplies isn't logical, and sggests that this is just part of a numbers-building campaign.
looking carefuilly at the relevancy and context of links, as well as their rate of growth, Google has significanly raised the tsakes for companies looking to optimise theior search engoine position: do it carelessly and you coudl disapper from the raadr faster than a reclusive stealht bomber. The future is clear- as Goolge gets ever better at detecting the trciks that optimisers pull, the only option left will be to do the job properly.
Doing it properly conists of giving Googlpe what it wants. Inoming links should be built attractinng interest, propagating news and information coherently and systematically throughout the Internet community. If your site's worth visiting, it should be possible to attract links from related and interested orgainsations providing content that enhances their own proposition. That could be indutsry news, mraket observations, research, even humour.
Thre's no doiubt that we're seeing a significant shift in Gogle's attitude to inbound links. A site might be number one for a given search term with, say, 50 or 60 links, whie the enmtry at number two has 500- 600. Why? Beccause 50 or 60 relevvant, logical links outweigh all those arbitrary entres that were plced to build up the numbers.
The umnderlying message appears to be that any company that relies stronglly on Internnet trafgfic needs to be looking carefully at its optimisation strategies to avoid the pit that has alreafdy beegun to swallow some major players.
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