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Pulling Google
By Mark Daoust (c) 2006

Admittedly, I have a bit of a childish mind. I often see things
as more animated and fantasized than they really are. When I
think of search engine optimizers, whether professionals or the
casual SEO for a personal website, they often remind me of a room
full of school children all waving their hands up in the air,
holding their breath, grunting, and whimpering for the chance to
have the teacher call on them (they have the best answer, after
all).

It's true. Most website owners would gladly spend a day outside
of the Googleplex jumping up and down, hoping, praying, and
whimpering for Google to take notice of their website, if they
thought for a moment that it would give them a chance at getting
a top ranking. We are absolutely obsessed with search – it is
the ultimate ego stroke to being a website owner.

Most modern SEO theories find their genesis in trying to push a
website to the front of Google's rankings. They start with the
idea that your website is the one that should be called on by
the teacher and give you methods on how to get the teacher's
attention. They teach how to raise your hand higher, how to
squirm just a bit more, how to sigh with extreme disappointment
when the teacher picks the website that is obviously the
teacher's pet.

This is push SEO, and it does work for many people. The problem
with push SEO is that our 'classroom' is huge. We are asking
Google to pick our site out of literally thousands, if not
millions, of websites that all have something to offer on the
subject at hand. We may believe that we have the best thing to
offer, but Google does not know that.

Lately, however, a theory (or method) seems to be arising that
counters the idea of push SEO. Rather than asking you to change
your website to fit Google's standards of a 'good result', this
theory is supposed to literally change Google's standards.

Google Has a Confidence Issue

I have already admitted to having a childish mind that creates
fantastic visions of how the world works, but I really think
that Google has a confidence issue. They are the ultimate
'know-it-all's'. Most of us are annoyed by that person who is
quick to correct us in a small detail or who seems to have an
answer to just about every question, but Google does just that.

Think about it – if you do a search for 'amazen', Google will
respond with "Did you mean: amazon?". How arrogant and rude can
a search engine be? How can they assume that they know what I am
looking for?

All joking aside, they usually do know what we are looking for.
They are so supremely confident that they know what we are
looking for because they have been able to successfully respond
to millions of questions daily for the past several years. But
like most people with confidence issues, if they feel that they
are being left out on a particular topic, they develop feelings
of inadequacy. As a result, Google is constantly trying to know
everything about everything. The idea behind pull SEO is to tell
Google that they are wrong or that they do not know something –
and that you have the website that they need to know about.

Mike Grehan on Pull SEO

I first was introduced to the idea of pull SEO by Mike Grehan
(http://www.mikegrehan.com/), a man, in my opinion, who
understands real SEO rather than just a bunch of SEO tricks.
Although I do not know the man personally (although I would be
happy to make his acquaintance), he is the one person who most
closely echos my thoughts on SEO.

Just recently he posted on his blog an interesting article on
how an in-progress event (http://www.mikegrehan.com/2006/01/
temporal-co-occurrence-how-does.html) can effect search results.
For example, take a tragedy such as Hurricane Katrina. When the
Hurricane hit, it was all that was on our minds and hearts, and
as a result, it was what people searched for in Google.
Consequently, the search results of the major search engines
changed.

Think about it – anytime a major disaster hits it becomes the
major subject of the search engines. When Pope John Paul II died
in 2005 searches for his name topped most search engine charts.
After Janet Jackson's right breast obfuscated the Super Bowl
halftime of 2004, search engines were quickly used as a resource
to relive the questionable moment. After September 11th, the
world flocked to a younger Google to find information on the
World Trade Towers and Osama Bin Laden.

If you think like a search engine, being able to present up to
date information based on the news of the day gives you a
distinct competitive advantage. If you have the results people
are looking for faster than others, then you suddenly become the
trusted resource everyone looks to.

Mike discusses in several other posts the idea of pull marketing
and how he actually uses it in his professional SEO
consultations. I am not sure if Mike is the originator of the
idea of pull SEO, but he is the first person that I learned this
theory from.

Marketing in a Bathroom

I read an interesting comment at Threadwatch
(http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5235#comment-32119) that gives
a great example of how pull SEO can actually work. The comment
related a story which seems to be fairly common place in the
website owner world. A new website owner, who was completely
unfamiliar with search engine optimization and website marketing
was looking for help. In an effort to help market the website,
the owner was instructed to place post-it notes with his website
address on it in several bathrooms.

The result of this marketing activity? Within a few months his
website rose to the top of the search engine rankings, he
started to see a good amount of traffic, and his search engine
woes were quickly taken care of.

What SEO work did this person actually do? In reality, there
was no SEO work at all – just regular viral marketing.

Making a Splash Big Enough To Notice – The Real Payoff

Allow me to be overdramatic for a moment, but if you want to get
to the top of Google, you not only have to be the website that
shows all the information possible on Hurricane Katrina, you
also have to be the website that causes Hurricane Katrina. In
other words, if you want to get to the top of the rankings –
make enough noise that people start searching for your website
independent of 'just finding' you in the search engine results
pages.

If Google's base is hammering their search results to know more
about BlueWidgets.com, then they will ultimately serve
BlueWidgets.com as a result to their users. If they fail to do
this, then they will lose trust among their users.

Mike Grehan often talks about the effect of a client launching a
major television commercial campaign and how there is an
immediate effect on that client's rankings in the search
engines. This is not a coincidence, but a direct result of
raising awareness of a website and Google responding to that new
awareness.

The Reality – Small Businesses Have Trouble Making Big Splashes

Pull SEO is good in theory, and it is very good for a Fortune
500 corporation, but the small company will certainly have
trouble utilizing pull SEO. Making a big publicity splash is
either very expensive or it takes something so unique and
revolutionary that making a splash is relatively simple. And,
for the small company that is able to grab a lot of attention
independent of the search engines, getting a top ranking really
becomes ancillary to all the news coverage they are probably
receiving.

But maybe this is the way it should actually be. Is it possible
that the way to get to the top of the rankings is to develop an
actual plan on how we will make our websites popular -
independent of the search engines? If we are able to create
enough buzz about our website, then search engine rankings,
although nice, suddenly become less of a focus.

Put Your Hand Down – Get Your Marketing Geared Up

Google asks us millions of questions every day. Which website
should they rank first for every topic that people ask about?
Naturally, we want to raise our hands hoping that Google will
call on us to answer their user's needs. But in all reality, we
need to put our hands down and start working.

Relying on a single entity, such as Google, is a bad strategy.
Google, as I mentioned earlier, is the ultimate stroke to a
webmaster's ego. It is the 'icing on the cake', the affirmation
of a job well done. It is not, however, the goal in and of
itself.

Your goal is to be successful independent of Google. Make your
website buzz worthy and Google will eventually take notice.
Google cannot ignore the demands of thousands of users.
================================================================
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference
(http://www.site-reference.com).

If you want to reference this article, please reference it at
its original published location, which can be found at:
(http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/
Pulling-Google.html).
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