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Google Confusion - And Some Clarity
By Mark Daoust (c) 2006

Achieving a top ranking in Google used to be relatively simple.
All it took was a lot of links, some on-page optimization, and
soon you would see your site rise in the rankings. Yet after a
mess of updates, a lot of speculation from 'experts', and what
appears to be major changes in Google's algorithm, ranking well
has entered a bit of a dark age.

Google confusion reigns. Recently a thread opened on the Site
Reference Forums for people to vent their frustration
(http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/2475/
My-turn-to-complain-about-Google/) over Google's changing
algorithms, the see-saw nature of rankings, and the reams of
conflicting information on what Google is actually looking for.
The thread has been a bit of therapy for those that have seen
their rankings slip and those that have yet to crack Google's
top rankings. It is, I fear, indicitave of how many webmasters
feel when trying to understand Google.

Google – An 'Open' Book

Even though there has never been so much confusion about how
Google ranks websites, Google has never tried harder to be more
open with the SEO community about their ranking policies. In the
past year or so, Google has offered more examples, more direct
advice, and more pro-active measures to help website owners know
what they are looking for, and more importantly, what to avoid.
Between Google Sitemaps, people like Matt Cutts offering free
advice from within the Googleplex, and Google's own program of
actively informing website owners of potential problems with
their site, Google is sharing a ton of information about how
they work, but relatively few webmasters seem to be listening.

It may partly be Google's newfound open personality that is
causing a lot of the confusion. In general, website owners who
either watch their rankings slip for some unknown reason, or
website owners who cannot seem to get their quality site to
crack the top rankings tend to be skeptical about anything
Google says. When a webmaster reads that Google frowns on link
exchanges, yet sees a competitor dominating the rankings with a
link exchange, they naturally dismiss the advice as not true.

The fact these people do not seem to want to admit to is this:
Google is changing. The old ranking techniques that once could
be used as a shortcut to a top ranking no longer work. Google
has learned, and continues to learn, for better or worse, how
to weed out websites that try to manipulate their rankings
through pandering to an imperfect algorithm.

The algorithm is still imperfect, and so is Google. With their
increased focus on reducing the effect of algorithm pandering
they have demoted some very legitimate websites and also raised
some lower quality websites into the top of their rankings. But
they are changing all the same – and widely accepted 'shortcut'
techniques are their target.

Conclusion Jumping

When it comes to SEO, a lot of webmasters live on Tom Smykowski's
'jump to conclusions mat' (http://img274.imageshack.us/img274/
4894/jumptoconclusions2xk.jpg). If they see one website that is
using link exchanges that has a top ranking for a particular
keyword, they assume that link exchanges must be the reason for
the high ranking. If they find a single site that uses hidden
text and ranks well, then it must follow that Google 'likes'
these things. Conclusion jumping is easy to do – especially when
a particular method works for your website, or is working for a
competitor's website.

Recently I wrote and published an article entitled "Valid HTML
– Does Google Care?" (http://www.site-reference.com/articles/
Search-Engines/Valid-HTML-Does-Google-Care.html). The article
raised the question as to whether Google actually preferred
invalid HTML over valid HTML. Four websites were tested on two
keyphrases that had no competition. The results of the test had
sites with invalid HTML consistently ranking higher than those
with valid HTML.

The article was heavily criticized, and rightfully so (mea
culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa). A general conclusion was drawn
from two very isolated cases, cases that were being tested on
keywords that did not have real life competition. At best, the
article could offer some insight into how Google ranks websites
for keywords with no competition, but to draw any larger
conclusions would be a logical error. (As a point of interest,
there has been information that while Google does not give
additional weight to valid HTML, they do encourage it to ensure
crawlability – invalid HTML can certainly make a website
impossible to crawl. Of course, there is no penalty for valid
HTML.).

The point of all this is simple: few SEO rules are going to hold
true in every example. Search results have both
macro-environments and micro-environments. To draw conclusions
from a single micro-environment, or even a handful of
micro-environments, about more general SEO theories is often a
big mistake. Just because you see one example of a link exchange
working well, that does not mean that Google wants to encourage
link exchanges or that they are unable to stop link exchanges.

What We Do Know

There is only one real certainty about Google: they are changing
and will continue to change. For the past few years, Google has
been refining their algorithm and rebuilding their index. Anyone
who thinks "Big Daddy" is the last of the major updates has not
been paying attention. Google does not sit still and will
constantly change to more efficiently find what it is they are
looking for.

We know that Google is looking for content – good original
content. They want websites that are linked to naturally from
reputable resources. They want to be able to trust your website,
which means that websites that they already trust and that are
related to your industry must 'vouch' for you. They want
websites that are easy to use for visitors, websites that
visitors are actually looking for.

We also know what Google is not looking for. They are not
looking for websites that pander to an algorithm, nor a site
that tries to fake its way into popularity through bogus links.
The time is coming when outright abuse of the system will no
longer be a valid option.

All this is very vague – so how about some specifics?

- Link exchanges for SEO is a bad idea. There is a big
difference between link exchanges for SEO and two sites that
happen to exchange links. Using automatic link exchanges, having
highly unrelated links, massive amounts of links regardless of
the quality, etc should be avoided at all costs.

- Purchasing links is definitely a bad idea. Some argue that
Google could never find out who is selling links. The fact is,
though, that purchased links, at least at the most basic level,
are extremely easy to detect.

- Thousands of links do not mean what they used to. Links must
be related. If you want to see a significant effect, they should
also come from highly trusted websites in a natural way.
It is possible to be hurt by bad links.

- Obvious SE spam, such as hidden text, redirects, etc will
eventually get you banned.

- Being a careful webmaster is important. Innocent and careless
mistakes can and will cost you. Setting up a website with broken
links, multiple URLs for the same page, poor navigation, etc
will scream poor quality.

- Rehashing content does not work. Google wants one of two
things: 1) completely original content, or 2) content
conglomerated in a completely original fashion. This goes along
the duplicate content filter that is talked about so much.

How do we know these things? Because Google has been open about
what they are looking for. These are not theories based on
observations, these are things that Google has discussed openly
through employees, at conferences, through the tools they offer
us. Unfortunately many webmasters simply do not want to listen.
================================================================
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference
(http://www.site-reference.com).

This article was originally published at
http://www.site-reference.com/articles/Search-Engines/
Google-Confusion-And-Some-Clarity.html
================================================================

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