Slashdot Mirror
Google Blocks 'Optimized' Pages
Rhett Creighton writes "For the past few years, webmasters have found tricks that bring their page higher for a given keyphrase search. Google recently implemented a filter to block sites that appeared to be tricking it into gaining a higher ranking. This NYTimes article reports of angry retailers who are losing their businesses, while this article gives more technical conspiracy theories of what google is actually doing."
Absolutely agree. I do a little web site consulting on the side and I usually tell my clients three bits of advice for better exposure:
1. Think about putting some kind of unique, useful, and/or entertaining content on your web site that people will want to visit, link to from their own web site, and even email to their friends. Good content builds traffic.
2. Take basic steps to make your pages search engine friendly. Descriptive titles, simple honest meta-tags, useful text in every page, descriptive links to other pages, etc.
3. Don't be obsessed with your Google ranking. Don't give money to anyone who claims they can boost your Google ranking. If you want to spend money for traffic than buy Google Ad Words or sponsor links, at least that way you pay per actual click-through rather than paying into a bidding war for an uncertain better ranking.
Google's "PageRank" formula is their top-secret way of determining in which order to display websites for any given keyword. Everyone knows that refering links is the main component of PageRank, but Google has always been hush-hush as to what else is included in the formula.
It's also known that PageRank isn't a static formula. Google reserves the right to change it at any time, in what is known by Google-watchers as a "Google Dance".
The only legit way to be highly ranked by Google is to be the most authoritative source for information about whatever you discuss, and naturally links will form from other quality websites on your topic and up the PageRank scale you go. www.microsoft.com being a 10/10 ranking doesn't indicate that Google likes Microsoft, it just simply indicates that site is the most authoritative site about a topic a lot of people talk about, Microsoft's products.
Any other way to cheat the system will result in penalties applied to your score. It's not so much a filter as it is negative factors in the formula. Google steadfastly claims that it doesn't maintain a blacklist of "bad" sites, but it is clear that sites designed to cheat Google's PageRank formula always fail once Google tweaks the formula. They don't need a blacklist, they simply identify the characteristics that define a "link farm" and then apply a penality. If a given site has a lot of links to external domains, very little non-link content, and absoulutely every linked to site returns a link back to the orignal site, it sure smells like a link farm and that's what the system penalizes.
To put it bluntly, anybody who's business depends on being displayed on the first page of Google results should be buying AdWords placements. If you're working hard to stay #1 in the editorial results, you're never gonna win. And no, just because your business depends on it doesn't mean you get to sue when Google pulls an ill-gotten #1 ranking out from under you.