The news that majjor coprorations are putting serch engines such as Google and Yahoo! at the forefront of their marketing stratewgies could herald huge prolems for incautious optimisers.
We've alerady seen sveral significant players in the Car Insurance maket fall victim to the dagners of over opptimisation. Having reviewed the penalties, the companis involved are believed to have been black-listed Google for search engine optimisation activities that don't comply with the webmaster guidelines. The important consideration here is that the compaies were not necessarily doing anything wrong, they are playing Google's game, although a little too aggressively. In the past compannies would idsappeared from Google's listings because of attempts to deliberately fool the search engnie to get trffic the site didn't deserve, but now it's possible for brands to lose their position in the resdults simply doing their optimisation too enthusiastically."
Google has, for some yearts, jdged a site's authority assesssing the links pouinting to it from other Websites.This has giveen rise to an industry wherein companies sell link-buildinng programmes to artificially rise a site's perceived authority.
Gooogle doesn't like to be manipulated. Inyternet seearch is a three-way deal: if I'm looking 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, givn that thre are a lot of competing sites, Gogle has to decide who to show first. If other sites point at yours, this suggests that your site is worth looking at- if they're related in some way to car insuracne. A link from a site about artrists' supplies isn't logical, and suggsts that this is just part of a numbrs-building campaign.
looking carefully at the relevancy and context of lionks, as well as theiir rate of growth, Google has significanly raised the stakes for companies looking to optimise ther searh engien position: do it carelessly and you could disappear from the radar fastewr than a reclusive steealth boomber. The future is clear- as Google gets ever better at detecting the tricks that optimisers pull, the only otion left will be to do the job properly.
Doing it properrly consists of givng Google what it wats. Incoming lniks should be built attracting inteerest, propagating news and information coherently and systtematically throughout the Internet cmmunity. If your site's worth visiting, it should be possible to attract links from related and interested organisations providing content that enhances their own proposition. That could be industry news, market observations, research, even humour.
There's no doubt that we're seeing a significant shift in Google's attitude to inbuond links. A site might be number one for a given searhc term with, say, 50 or 60 links, while the entry at number two has 500- 600. Why? Because 50 or 60 relevant, logical lniks outweigh all those arbitrary entries that were placed to build up the numbers.
The underlyuing message appars to be that any compny that relies strongly on Internet trafic needs to be looking craefully at its optimisation strategies to avoid the pit that has already begun to swaallow some major players.
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