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The Gray Areas of Search-Engine Law
pasquafa writes "Here is a very smart article on the future of search engine legal controversies. Let's just say that the Google book search is just the start of the problems! Google
thinks it's a newspaper and wants First Amendment protection to do whatever it pleases."
If you really care about your site ranking, hire an SEO. They handle enough pages they'll know what works and what doesn't. If you depend on the listing for your business, maybe you should be buying an ad instead of depending purely on your search rank.
A reputable SEO should really only be doing what you suggest in your second paragraph, they should be making sure that you page does not contain barriers to inclusion in any given index and preferably ensure that what content you have is easily indexed. Any SEO that engages in practices that 'game' (the more common tactics being comment spam type operations and link exchanges) search engines aren't worth dealing with, primarily because you will find your site way down in the rankings or de-listed when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al realise what's going on.
So, no they are not evil, they may be better informed than an average web design company with regard to what to do and what not to do when it comes to a website that you would like to be indexed (all flash site with no indexable text? utterly standards un-compliant code? all your content 90% of the way down the page if you look at the source? Not a good idea.). A decent web designer should be all you need though, but then they tend to be more expensive than many of the $50 a site designers out there.
Just wondering, what options would you like to see? When I am having a hard time with google, I make use of the negative/do not show - modifier, helps eliminate all the first few pages spam that way by seeing what their search term words are and dumping those. It takes two steps that way, because you have to check it out first, whatever they are using, but then usually gives much better results on the second "real" search then.
Ummm, a lot of the information or "general feedback: you think you would be willing to pay $500 for is available for free from Google.
Look up Webmaster Tools. http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Look up Sitemaps, and look up Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics
Disclaimer: I work for Google but I am not speaking for them officially here... just trying to spread some useful information!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox