by Matt McGee
One World Telecommunications
posted: March 30, 2006
Not long ago, you could achieve respectable search
engine visibility by optimizing your web pages
and getting some incoming links from other sites.
Times have changed, and search engine visibility
in 2006 is a much more difficult task. Today,
visibility on the web is a lot like visibility
off the web; SEO and SEM are more similar than
ever to public relations and traditional marketing.
You'll need a comprehensive strategy to succeed,
not just a well-optimized web page and a few inbound
links.
Before we talk about "How," let's talk
about "Why."
Today, search engine visibility is a bloodsport.
For every business owner hoping his web site ranks
well via what we call traditional methods, there's
another business owner using every trick in the
book to get her site to the coveted Top 10. And
beyond those two, there are several others spamming
the search engines with auto-generated "web
sites" plastered with ads that bring revenue
every time someone stumbles on the site and clicks
an ad. (Believe it or not, that can be a very
lucrative business!)
Here's what you have to understand: For every well-known
method that search engines have ever used to rank
web pages, there's been someone (well, many people)
who have pushed that method to the limit, rendering
it nearly useless as a ranking method in search
engine algorithms. Consider this:
Mid- to Late-1990s: keywords
We used to insert keywords into the hidden code
of a web page. Visitors never saw these keywords,
but search engine spiders did. Keywords were how
we told a search engine what a page was about.
What happened? "Spammers," for lack of
a better word, stuffed their keywords list with
irrelevant words that had nothing to do with the
actual content of their page. They lied. They
put words like "britney spears" or "nude
celebrities" into their keywords, knowing
that those words would bring more traffic than
words like "fishing lures" or "basketball
sneakers." They killed the keywords meta
tag and made it useless as a way for search engines
to determine what a page is about and rank it.
Late-1990s / early 2000s: links
Google pioneered the use of links as a way to rank
web pages. It was a simple idea: links from other
sites were "votes" -- the more pages
that linked to yours, the more valuable your page
must be. And they used the wording of the link
to help determine what your page was about; if
a lot of sites linked to you with the phrase "green
widgets," that helped your site rank higher
when people searched for "green widgets."
Google started this, and other search engines
followed.
What happened? People started "link farms"
where any web page could get easy, free links.
Spammers developed "site networks" --
in addition to a main site, they created several
other web sites and/or blogs (not just 2-3 others,
but dozens and even hundreds) that all linked
to the main site. In both cases, these schemes
diminished the idea of a link as a "vote."
More recently, web sites started selling links
-- text links, especially. You could buy a link
from another site. It's a perfectly legitimate
form of advertising, but it also played a part
in reducing the value of links as a way to determine
a page's search engine ranking.
Early 2000s: blogs / RSS
Blogging began to grow in the early part of the
decade and, at first, blogs were exactly what
search engines loved: real content that is regularly
updated. Bloggers generously shared relevant links,
pointing their readers to other interesting web
pages.
But blogs were quick and easy to create, and thanks
to services like Blogger (currently owned by Google,
ironically), you could create a blog for free
in a matter of minutes. This was a spammer's heaven:
he could make one blog in a matter of minutes,
dozens of blogs in a few hours, hundreds and thousands
of blogs over the course of a few weeks or months.
A spammer could launch a new site and, within
hours, have hundreds or thousands of links pointing
to that new site from his network of blogs. It
was easy to get instant search visibility.
Where'd they get the content for all these "fake"
blogs? RSS was growing more popular as a legitimate
way to distribute your content outside the web
browser to interested readers -- and it still
is. But it also meant spammers could take an RSS
feed and have it display on their blogs, with
updates showing up automatically - no hands-on
maintenance required. Since they were "scraping"
legitimate content from other sites and had hundreds/thousands
of incoming links, many of these spam blogs started
to clutter up the SERPs. For every legitimate
web site that launched on a given day, hundreds
or thousands of spam sites launched, too.
So, as you can see, all of these methods of determining
how to rank web pages became useless because of
aggressive search engine marketers. Each method
was pushed to the limit -- more accurately, pushed
beyond the limit -- by web site owners and marketers
trying to get an edge on the competition and beat
the search engines at the ranking game.
So, how did the search engines react? Coming soon:
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