Always looking for Google loopholes

Did you ever think what might happen if Google stopped worrying about whether the search content returned was truly relevant? I mean, what would happen if some searcher typed in the words “American Civil War” into the search field, and Google simply returned all the websites that claimed to have something to do with those words? If a porn site had a meta description of American Civil War, or had those words in hypertext repeated over and over on the top three lines of their home page, then that site would be returned for the searcher’s consideration.

Ridiculous.

Of course it’s ridiculous. This illustrates the need for Google to try and verify that the actual site content is relevant to the search.

As with so many other things in this world, it is the bad apples in the barrel who spoil the good thing for the rest of us. As soon as Google tried to do something good, they were immediately confronted with cheaters and charletons and liers and other scum who were determined to do it the easiest way, the dishonest way, rather than the right way. The goal was to get search engine traffic to their sites, and they didn’t care at all how they did it.

Would you like to find out where to track down the spammers that are inundating your email with trash? My guess is that if you find a website cheating for page rank, doing all the things they can think of to “beat” Google’s search algorithm, these are the same people who also send out spam at night. They have no scruples when it comes to getting traffic to their site. Just my opinion, of course.

The next time you visit a website that proudly offers, for a price, to teach you ways to outwit Google, think of the owner of that website as a spammer. He probably is.

Search Engines 2

Speaking of Yahoo and Google, these are pretty much the only search engines you really need to be thinking about pleasing. There are others, obviously, but if you rank highly on these two then the rest will take care of themselves. Don't make it complicated. You don't have to pay anyone to list your site on 500 directories or search sites. That's a waste of time. You will be amazed at how many of the other search engines know about your site shortly after you show up on Yahoo and Google. That's because the other sites pretty much rent Yahoo and Google's search info.

Keep your site clean and uncluttered, keep it simple, use metadata descriptions and keywords for your pages (at least for your home page), write honest natural text, don't try to fool the search engines. Know their rules and play by their rules. That's my advice.

Is there anything else you can do to help get your site higher on the search engine horizon? Oh, yes. To be sure.

Search Engines

There is more than one thing to consider when you are trying to optimize your website so the search engines can find you, of course, but the first thing you will want to think about is relevant content.

Search engines strive to return content that seems to be relevant to the words or phrases their searcher has entered. That makes sense. One thing you can do to help is to include metadata which describes your site subject succinctly, and offers several keyword suggestions. Metadata is not seen by your site visitors, but it is seen by the search engine bots who roam the internet at night. More often than not, you can control the caption of your page, the short description that is displayed on the search engine's results, simply by taking the time to do this simple step.

But beyond that, the best advice would probably be to let the actual visible text on your pages flow naturally. Don't try and get cute with using key phrases over and over again in your sentences, or, worse, type a bunch of nonsensical key phrases. There was a time when that would work, believe it or not, but the search engines are much too sophisticated today. When they crawl your pages and evaluate your content, they will know who is being naughty and who is playing nice. So play nice. If you try to fool them like you did in the old days, you will only make them angry. And you don't want to make Yahoo and Google angry.