Last year, Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is “too much of their branding.” After some words from Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case.

Note: Watch Norvig’s keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is “overhyped,” and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. “There’s a technical formula that’s PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that’s just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There’s all these other things that come in, but they don’t have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that’s where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that…We’ll get some marketing guys on it.”

I don’t know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company’s repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

WebProNews will be doing a live interview with Google’s Matt Cutts today at at live.webpronews.com. Perhaps he will offer his thoughts on the subject.

There are two limitations to the Google toolbar:

1.  The toolbar sometimes guesses. If you enter a page, which is not in its index, but where there is a page that is very close to it in Google’s index, then it will provide a guesstimate of the PageRank. This guesstimate is worthless for our purposes because it isn’t featured in any of the PageRank calculations. The only way to tell if the toolbar is a guesstimate is to type the URL into the Google search box and see if the page shows up in the SERPS. If it doesn’t, then the toolbar is guessing!
2.  The toolbar is just a representation of actual PageRank. Whilst PageRank is linear, Google has chosen to use a non-linear graph to portray it. So on the toolbar, to move from a PageRank of 2 to a PageRank of 3 takes less of an increase than to move from a PageRank of 3 to a PageRank of 4. A comparison table best illustrates this phenomenon. The actual figures are kept secret so we’ll just use any figures for demonstration purposes:

pagerank demonstration, pagerank, top 10 optimizer, seo

The PageRank shown in the Google directory (http://directory.google.com) suffers from the same problems. The PageRank shown in the directory is also on a different scale. There have been attempts to cross-reference these two scales but because they are non-linear, the results really do not tell you anything more than you already know.

Also of note is that a programmer managed to generate a tool to look up PageRank without using Internet Explorer. This tool has since been withdrawn, but whilst originally the numbers given by this software and Google’s toolbar matched – presently querying with such software sometimes produces different numbers than querying with the toolbar. This is Google’s right to protect their data, but is the strongest indication that:

Sometimes what you see on the Google toolbar may not be related to actual PageRank at all. (Google can and does, assign whatever toolbar PageRank value they want to assign to a page.)

• Create content or ideas that important people can identify with and would likely link to.

• Directories may link to sites you submit.

• You can exchange links with similar websites. If you can afford to, It is better to create legitimate business partnerships and friendships rather than just to trade links with whoever is willing.

• Writing articles about your topic and placing them on other websites can give you inbound links via the article signature. If you submit articles to other sites, you may want to create unique content just for the article submission sites, or have a longer or different version of the article on your site so that you are not fighting against duplicate content issues when others syndicate your articles.

• Writing press releases can give you inbound links.

• You can participate in forums that provide signature links. If you participate in communities and leave relevant, useful comments, then eventually people may want to link to you if they start to like you.

• Buy links or rent advertising space.

• Donate to charities for links.

• People interested in your site may eventually link to you without you asking. Generally, this is where SEO battles are either won or lost in competitive markets.

Generally, the easier and cheaper the link is to get, the less a search engine will want to trust it. Getting other people to want to talk about you or your business (and link to you) is the golden egg of SEO.

Search engines want to count legitimate editorial citations. They would prefer not to count other types of links as votes. Some engines, such as Google, have advanced algorithms to find and discount many artificial links.

Many website owners wonder why their websites rank well in Yahoo and MSN but not in Google. Why is this so and what can you do about that?

It takes some time until Google lists new websites. After you have received a 100% rating from Top10Optimizer, Google needs some time to list your optimized web page.

Google’s sandbox and your website

In general, brand-new websites with new domain names need about six to eight months to get top rankings on Google.

The usual process is that Google indexes the new website, lists it for some less important queries and then the web pages drop from the search engine result pages for several months. Although other search engines list the site properly, Google doesn’t list the website, sometimes not even for the company name.

If you have a brand-new website, don’t worry about this. You are not necessarily doing anything wrong. Google delays the inclusion of new websites. This phenomenon is called the Google sandbox.

Why does Google delay the inclusion of brand-new websites?

It seems that Google delays the inclusion of brand-new websites to encourage webmasters to build content instead of building mini-networks.

Many webmasters try to artificially inflate the link popularity of their website by creating a network of small websites with different URLs that all link to each other. Many of these websites have no purpose other than linking to the main website.

By delaying the ranking of new websites, this mini-network strategy doesn’t offer a quick jump to the top anymore. The delay might encourage webmasters to focus on the content of their main website instead of building useless mini sites.

What does this mean to you?

If you have a new website, expect that your website will be listed within six to eight months in Google. Add content to your website, get good incoming links and make sure that your web pages are optimized for Google.

As soon as you have a domain name, create a temporary page and link to it from another website to make Google aware of your website. The six to eight months delay starts with Google’s first contact with your website. The sooner Google knows your website, the sooner you’ll be listed.

Yahoo and MSN don’t have such a delay so don’t focus on Google alone but also optimize your web pages for these search engines.

Thing? And How Do I Beat It?

Ok, so over the past month or so I’ve been collecting various search engine optimization questions from all of you. Today, I’m going to answer what was the most frequently asked question over the past month.

You guessed it… What is the Google Sandbox Theory and how do I escape it? When you finish reading this lesson, you’ll be an expert on the good ‘ole Google Sandbox Theory and you’ll know how to combat its effects. So, pay close attention. This is some very important stuff.

Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear:

· The Google Sandbox theory is just that, a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google or the benefit of years of observation.

· The Google Sandbox theory has been floating around since summer 2004, and has only really gained steam after February 4, 2005 , after a major Google index update (something known as the old Google dance).

· Without being able to verify the existence of a Sandbox, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

· Almost everything that you will read on the Internet on the Google Sandbox theory is conjecture, pieced together from individual experiences and not from a widescale objective controlled experiment with hundreds of websites (something that would obviously help in determining the nature of the Sandbox, but is inherently impractical given the demand on resources).

Thus, as I’ll be discussing towards the end, it’s important that you focus on ‘good’ search engine optimization techniques and not place too much emphasis on quick ‘get-out-ofjail’ schemes which are, after all, only going to last until the next big Google update.

What is the Google Sandbox Theory?

There are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.

In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.

This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.

Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.

Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed ‘Allegra‘ (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.

This was a major update to Google’s search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent ‘exodus’ of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.

Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox effect

A common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the ‘Time Delay‘ factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were ‘released’ in the ‘Allegra’ update, this ‘website aging‘ theory has gained a lot of ground.

However, I don’t find much truth in the ‘Time Delay’ factor because by itself, it’s just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.

Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the ‘Allegra’ update. Along with shattering the ‘Time Delay’ theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a ‘link threshold’ theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.

While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive linkbuilding campaigns. In my opinion, linkpopularity

is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.

This concept is known as ‘link-aging’. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the ‘age’ of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.

The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have don’t have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, don’t you?) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results – some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the ‘Allegra’ update.

How to find out if your website is ‘Sandboxed’

Finding out if your website is ‘Sandboxed’ is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almostperfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core ‘good’ SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engine’s weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I’m talking about, let’s take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding Search Engines

If you’re looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this – the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping from the Google Sandbox

Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine’s algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does ‘holds back’ new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website. As the ‘Allegra’ update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon – combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy – have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your website’s ‘Sandboxed’ time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website’s ‘Sandboxed’ time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don’t need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the ‘white hat’ rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles I’ve mentioned many times in this course, you’ll not only minimize your website’s Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Here’s a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

· Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is ‘ready’. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your website to be ‘perfect’. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

· Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly – so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

· Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ‘cloaking’. Google’s search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

· Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don’t waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine – just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as ‘good’ content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine’s algorithm, whether it’s a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.

Have you taken a look at SEO Elite yet? If not…

What’s stopping you?

Now, get out there and start smoking the search engines!

All the best,

Brad Callen

]]> http://top10optimizer.com/fyi-google-sandbox-theory-by-brad-callen/feed/ 0 http://top10optimizer.com/what-google-says-about-pagerank/ http://top10optimizer.com/what-google-says-about-pagerank/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:32:09 +0000 top 10 optimizer http://www.top10optimizer.com/?p=143 What Google says

The best information about PageRank is, of course, straight from the horse’s mouth. We therefore felt it would be helpful to ask Google themselves about PageRank. Obviously, we realize Google won’t provide us with the exact specifics about PageRank or comment on the validity of what we’ve written However, we did want to ask them some general questions to provide us with an overview of how they see PageRank – now and in the future. We hope this this short interview will help debunk a few myths and answer some questions

Edy: Can you answer the age old question for us? Is PageRank named after the fact it is “page” based, or is it named after one of the creators?

Google: PageRank is named for Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products.

Edy: Does Google view PageRank as being a significant distinguishing feature from the other search engines?

Google: PageRank is a technology which contributes to the speed and relevance that differentiate Google from other search engines. In addition, Google employs 100 other algorithms to its ranking formula.

Edy: Does Google believe that PageRank significantly benefits the quality of its results pages and does it expect this to continue in the future?

Google: Because of the scalable approach PageRank uses to analyze links, it will continue to be a significant factor in Google’s search results.

Edy: Several people have been known to try to data mine the PageRank information given by the toolbar, how does Google feel about this?

Google: Mining PageRank data from the Google Toolbar is against Google’s terms of service.

Edy: How useful do you think the PageRank information is on the toolbar for a) normal users b) webmasters c) search engine optimization professionals?

Google: The PageRank information on the Google Toolbar is an estimate and is intended only for informational purposes. Many users have found it interesting and webmasters have been known to use it as a measure of their performance. However, because it is a rough estimate, the value to search engine optimization professionals is limited.

Edy: One method that people have been known to try to boost PageRank is by using link farms and guestbooks. How is Google likely to react to a site doing that?

Google: Google’s engineers are constantly working to update Google’s ranking algorithm to prevent manipulation of Google’s rankings.

]]> http://top10optimizer.com/what-google-says-about-pagerank/feed/ 0 http://top10optimizer.com/what-is-pagerank-how-is-pagerank-determined-how-can-you-tell-what-a-page%e2%80%99s-pagerank-is/ http://top10optimizer.com/what-is-pagerank-how-is-pagerank-determined-how-can-you-tell-what-a-page%e2%80%99s-pagerank-is/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:02:10 +0000 top 10 optimizer http://www.top10optimizer.com/?p=138 The original PageRank Explained document has existed for a long time. It was the first of its kind to present many of the ideas in a way that the average person can understand. You may be wondering why there is a need for a new version of this document. The reasoning is simple; everything in the original document was theoretical and subject to change. These changes have occurred through the authors’ further learning on how Google reacts and how we think about the subject. To this end you will note that an additional author and technical editor has been added to the paper. Mike Shishigin’s extensive mathematical ability enables us to explore some new areas of PageRank not mentioned before, as well as provide a section at the end that contains more advanced information. We hope to present PageRank in a way that gets across everything you could possibly need to know — without baffling you. However, if you want to know the extremely technical stuff, then we’ll give you that at the end.

We’re pleased that the principles in the original PageRank Explained document seem to have been accepted universally within the search engine optimization field. The one document that appears to criticise it, later explains why each of the points it makes are valid. We’re also pleased that since its publication, a vast amount of additional articles have been written about PageRank.

Despite all this, things have changed, and there are still a lot of misunderstandings regarding the importance (or unimportance) of PageRank. We’ve added new sections to address these, and new sections to address some new things. We’ve also tried to make the existing sections more understandable. This is a long document; it’s written so that a broad range of people can understand it. As it’s also used as a major reference in several university courses, we will do our best detail as much as possible. If you are “Joe Average,” then you can simply limit your concern to understanding the principles until you’re ready to dig deeper.

Finally, we thought it was time to dedicate some space to Google’s thoughts about PageRank. Obviously Google is not going to comment on exact ranking issues but, as it is their technology, what they say about it gives us lots of insight. We asked Barry Schnitt, spokesperson for Google, a few questions about various PageRank related topics and he was kind enough to give us some answers; you’ll find those answers later in the document.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is Google’s method of measuring a page’s “importance.” When all other factors such as Title tag and keywords are taken into account, Google uses PageRank to adjust results so that sites that are deemed more “important” will move up in the results page of a user’s search accordingly.

A basic overview of how Google ranks pages in their search engine results pages (SERPS) follows:

1) Find all pages matching the keywords of the search.

2) Rank accordingly using “on the page factors” such as keywords.

3) Calculate in the inbound anchor text.

4) Adjust the results by PageRank scores.

In reality, it’s slightly more complex and we’ll discuss this in more depth later, but for now the above description serves our purposes. It’s worth noting that PageRank is a multiplier and is not just simply added to the score. Thus, if your page had a PageRank of zero, it would rank at the very end of the SERPS.

How is PageRank determined?

The Google theory goes that if Page A links to Page B, then Page A is saying that Page B is an important page. PageRank also factors in the importance of the links pointing to a page. If a page has important links pointing to it, then its links to other pages also become important. The actual text of the link is irrelevant when discussing PageRank.

How can you tell what a page’s PageRank is?

To learn what a page’s PageRank is, you can download a toolbar for Internet Explorer from http://toolbar.google.com. Once installed, there will be a bar graph at the top of the browser showing a version of PageRank for the page you’re browsing. When you hold the mouse over the bar, you see a number from zero to ten. (If you don’t see the number, you may have an older version of the toolbar installed. You will need to completely uninstall it, reboot your computer and reinstall the latest version. Once this is done, you should be able to see the PageRank number.)

to be continued..

]]> http://top10optimizer.com/what-is-pagerank-how-is-pagerank-determined-how-can-you-tell-what-a-page%e2%80%99s-pagerank-is/feed/ 0 http://top10optimizer.com/what-does-google-really-want/ http://top10optimizer.com/what-does-google-really-want/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 09:13:53 +0000 top 10 optimizer http://www.top10optimizer.com/?p=114 What Does Google Really Want?

Like it or not, search engine optimization plays an important part for any online business, and more so for new and small businesses. On cash-strapped budgets, we don’t have the deep pockets to buy expensive links on high-traffic websites, and extensive PPC spending (I’m talking about over $100 a day) is beyond us, at least at the start.

So the rest of us are, in the end, left with getting traffic the (free) cheap way – building links, regularly adding content, optimizing our pages and trawling through SEO forums for that next big breakthrough in SEO strategies that will give us the edge over our competition.

In other words, we are all caught up in the SEO rat race. And there seems to be no end in sight.

At times like these, it’s a good idea to step back and look at the situation from a more “detached” perspective. Forget about your website, forget about your online business, forget about making money from the Internet while sitting at home and sleeping in on Mondays.

Instead, I want you to have only one thought, just four words in your mind:

“What does Google want?”

Why Google, you ask? What a stupid question, you might also ask. Well, let me explain myself. However, while I do so, keep this question in mind and try to answer it alongside me.

Now…when you reduce search engine marketing to its basics, it is all about doing what is necessary (and acceptable by the search engines) in order to get a high ranking in search engine results (SERPs). So our SEO strategies depend directly on what works best in the search engines.

Now, let’s take that thought a bit further – how do you know what works best? Well, the search engines keep their ranking algorithm secret, and no one really understands how rankings “really” work. Sure, we can all approximate, and some of us have made (and will continue to make) millions by getting it “right”. But in the absence of cold and hard facts from the people running the search engine traffic, there’s no way to know for sure.

What the search engines do tell us is pretty vague – your website content must be unique, useful, and should be fresh. Targeting your website to a particular industry helps as well. Links? Search engines sure like them. In fact, search engines like them quite a lot. But hey, that’s not all to search engines, is it? What about quality content?

The truth is that in the age of super-instant gratification (ever met a cliché you liked? ), links are your “easy” ticket into search engine rankings. In face of the “simplicity” of getting other websites to link to yours (made even easier by SEO tools), good content takes a VERY distant second place.

The search engines can be blamed for placing too much emphasis on links, although in the last year or so, led by Google, the search engines have gradually moved away from giving links too much importance and have started looking at relevance and user feedback (read personalized search) Even then, SEO campaigns takes a familiar shape:

Do some keyword research and build a master list of keywords.

Write “keyword optimized” articles for the search engines.

Build links to your website using keywords in the anchor text (and choosing link partners in the same niche (to win on the relevance factor).

In that formula, somehow, somewhere, people started taking shortcuts. First, there was link spamming to trick search engines into ranking their websites higher. Then, there were “content-generating” scripts – the poor man’s version of obscene levels of keyword stuffing carried out only for manipulating search engines.

Maybe it’s unfair to call this tactics trickery or manipulation. After all, there is a system, there’s a way of cracking it and getting to the top of it without much effort, so why not take the quick and dirty shortcut and move on?

On the surface, the debate seems to be between “ethical” and “unethical” methods (or, as they like to say, between white hats and black hats) of SEO. In reality, your morality, or the color of your headgear, does not matter. At all.

What DOES matter is the question I asked you earlier. What does Google want?

In fact, replace Google with the search engine of your choice. Take Yahoo. Msn. IceRocket if fancy strikes you, but the point remains the same.

What are the search engines looking for?

Search engines, believe it or not, are looking to keep their visitors. Surprised? Shoot, why not, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Search is as much a business as selling widgets or owning a roadside café, and in a business, getting and keeping your customers (searchers) is your top priority. No searchers = no money, and that’s the bottom line.

So how do the search engines get, and keep, their visitors? Once you start thinking of search engines as being businesses, everything falls into place. Building customer loyalty is a crucial factor for any successful business.

Be The Best At What You Do!

For search engines, this means being the best at what they do, and to offer the most complimentary services. Leaving SE accessories (like Yahoo’s portal or Google’s various services) aside, the only way search engines can get and bring back searchers is by giving them what they want.

Searchers (much like you and me) want information. They want it to get to it fast. They want it to be right. Most importantly, they want it be right the first time around. That’s a difficult ask for the search engines (isn’t that an understatement), and they are bound to screw things up along the way.

Now, it suddenly becomes clear (it will to you as well, just hang on). It doesn’t matter what “algorithm” a search engine is using, or what particular SEO tactic seems to be working best this month (or week). In the end, search engines will always be working towards providing users “better” results – where better invariably translates into useful and updated information for the searcher. You can go through ten thousand search engine updates, but the end goal remains the same.

This is certainly no revelation. Search engines (and many SEO gurus) have been saying this all this time. Quality content is the best way to build search engine rankings – it is the only guarantee towards an organic linking campaign, and along with user feedback (personalized search) it has fast become the focus of search engine “updates”.

That’s not to say that link building does not work – in fact, link building still remains the easiest way to get search engine rankings. However, quality content (and the $5 an article that most webmasters pay on RentACoder is not quality , no matter what your standards) serves your business in so many different ways that it seems almost foolish, and certainly short-sighted, of webmasters to not invest in it.

FACT:

Quality content helps with conversions – people will buy more from you if you help them in their quest for knowledge, and they will come back for more if they like what you are telling them.

Quality content does wonders in search engines – despite the fact that search engine rankings are automated, good writing is written for the readers and thus not over-optimised – over-optimization is a big problem for webmasters and it’s something that search engines have been penalizing for a while now.

Quality content is your surest guarantee for building links organically, or naturally – someone comes to your website and likes your website so much that they link to it on their blog, resources page or anywhere else on their website (it happens all the time).

Quality content is also the best bet to get one-way links in your link building campaigns without having to pay for them – webmasters are more likely to link to a website that is actually useful than just for the sake of building their links page.

Finally, and most importantly, quality content is what searchers are looking for. It’s what search engines are trying to provide (to their users). In short, that’s what the search engines are looking for: quality content. Makes sense to do what the search engines are looking for, and THEN build your SEO strategy around that, doesn’t it?

So the next time you’re stuck in a rut, and are despairing about your search engine rankings, stop what you are doing, take a step back and ask yourself this simple question:

“What DOES Google want?”