August 6th, 2010 by Jon

Search engine optimisation used to be a lot simpler than it is today. These days a great many companies feel compelled to enlist the services of qualified and experienced SEO services to give them an edge when it comes to appearing in results pages from search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo! What web publishers did in the past was essentially figure out what words (or ‘keywords’) were being entered into search engine queries most often and put them into titles, text and Meta tags wherever possible on their pages. If companies wanted to bring people to the site by unscrupulous means they could use spamming to gain a high page ranking with search engines, and this is of course what many of them did. The Internet became a minefield of irrelevant sites trying to market unwanted products to annoyed search engine users. In these dark times you could count on unscrupulous search engine optimisation services to advise on any number of  ‘black hat’ methods to bring empty short-term gains in terms of visitors.

Death of Spam

Eventually, search engines got wise to spamming methods and largely expunged many illicit practices through punishing users and developing technologies to combat it. As a web user, you’ll know that it’s somewhat of a surprise to find a high ranking site through Google that is entirely spam.

Google Wins

Much of the combating of poor practice was down to Google, and their sophisticated algorithm for determining page rank. There’s still a great deal of mystery that surrounds page rank, and it’s very easy to spend hours reading about it online without reaching a clear understanding of what it is. But of course that’s its purpose, and any SEO company that tells you it has all the answers is not being entirely truthful.

Page Rank

With the introduction of page rank and its emphasis on inbound links a new form of spamming was born. Buying or trading links in vast amounts became a common practice. The problem with this idea was that search engines paid attention to the validity and relevance of links rather than their numbers. The search engines certainly did take notice of the practice of obtaining non-relevant links though, and implemented penalties for sites employing this new method of spamming. Irrelevant links came to be seen as damaging. This led to climate of suspicion as search engines implemented penalties for what they perceived as spamming. Whereas before it would have been ok to feature an irrelevant link or two, it came to be seen as unacceptable. This search engines exercised their burgeoning power. Advice from them amounted to a decree to pretend they didn’t exist and the web publishing community was forced to think carefully about which strategies they could safely use to bring traffic to their sites.

Conclusions

Most people realized that you couldn’t rely on ignoring search engines to get you onto their results pages. It came to be well known that avoiding Flash, JavaScript and frames on pages would help to get results for sites. HTML files for the easy access of search engines came to be an essential feature of sites.

The overriding principle should now be that you’re not using methods that bring visitors to your site which trick them in any way. If you are then you’re on very thin ice as far as search engines are concerned.

These days the game is changing faster than ever, as technology turns leaps into bounds across the board. While it wouldn’t have been entirely unwise to follow the advice of search engines to pretend they didn’t exist and simply create good sites, we can add some important points to that now. Webmasters need to keep search engines in mind when they design their sites and when they market them.

It’s turned out that advice from search engines was correct and that marketing your site as if they didn’t exist is beneficial after all. All the various factors that make a site interesting seem to help in terms of ranking, as popularity increasingly seems to breed more of the same.
Do not try to fool the search engines as it’s become a kind of a cliché to attempt it. These days, if you’re thinking o getting advice from an SEO company make sure they only advise you on ‘white hat’ ways of improving your status and reputation. Make use of the free SEO tools: good content and usability.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.