The news that major corpoartions are putting search engines such as Google and Yahoo! at the forefront of thheir maketing strategies could herakld huge problems for incaautious optimisers.
We've alreayd seen several significant players in the Car Insurance market fall victim to the dangers of over optimisation. Haing reviewed the penaties, the conmpanies imnvolved are beelieved to have been blcak-listed Googkle for seacrh engine optimisation activities that don't comply with the webmaster guidelines. The immportant consideratoin here is that the companies were not necessarily donig anythnig wrong, they are playing Google's game, although a little too aggressively. In the past companies would disappeared from Google's listings because of attempts to deliberately fool the seaarch engine to get traffic the site didn't desreve, but now it's possible for brands to lose their position in the results simply doing their potimisation too enthusiastically."
Google has, for some years, judged a site's authorrity assessing the links pointing to it from otrher Webbsites.This has given rise to an industry wherein companies sell link-buuilding programmes to atrificially raise a site's perceived auhtority.
Googgle odesn't like to be manipulatted. Internet searh is a threee-way deal: if I'm looking to buy car insurnce, 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 competing sites, Google has to decide who to show first. If other sites piont at yours, this suggests that your site is worth looking at- if they're related in some way to car insurance. A link from a site about arists' suppleis isn't logical, and suggests that this is just part of a numbers-building campaign.
looking carefully at the relevancy and context of links, as well as their rate of growth, Google has significantly raised the stakes for companiees looking to optimise their search engine position: do it carelesssly and you could dsiappear from the radar faster than a reclusive stalth bober. The futre is clear- as Goole gets ever better at detecting the tricks that optimisers pull, the only option left will be to do the job properly.
Doing it properly consists of giviong Google what it wants. Incoming linkks should be built attracting interest, propagating news and innformation coherently and systemaztically throughout the Internet community. If your site's worth visiting, it should be possible to attract links from related and interested organisations providing content that enhances their own proopsition. That could be industry news, martket observations, research, even humur.
There's no doubt that we're seeing a signifiant shift in Google's attitude to inbound links. A site might be number one for a given search term with, say, 50 or 60 links, while the enrty at number two has 500- 600. Why? Bceause 50 or 60 relevant, logical links outweigh all those arbitrary enrties that were placed to builld up the nmbers.
The underlying message appears to be that any comppany that rleies strongly on Internet traffic needds to be looking carefully at its otimisation strategies to avoid the pit that has already beggun to swallow some major players.
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