Search Engine Musings

Sometimes I really do want to beat my head off the keyboard! Like many others who may be reading this I epouse ethical search engine optimisation techniques. I advise clients not to use any of the spammer’s tricks and to produce quality content. I tell them not to use hidden text or dodgy redirects or spammy meta-tags, that Google and the other engines will pick that stuff up and kick them out of the indexes.

And then what do Google do? I’ll demonstrate.

For quite some time I’ve ranked number one in Google for “Scottish SEO consultant”. I’m not precious about it, there are some excellent SEO consultants in Scotland and I’m happy to be in amongst them - the phrase happens to be in my blog title so that gives me an advantage on that one out of scores of other similar phrases. Tonight I checked some of my rankings as Google has been erratic again recently (coincidence with the big PageRank debacle?) and saw that I was down to number six for that phrase. No problem, noticed that Shaun Anderson’s Hobo site was above me, that’s ok it’s a damn good site. A bit peaved to notice that above him was a company in Derbyshire (with a greyed out PR bar!) whose only connection to Scotland seems to be that they did a site for a Scottish property company.

But what really got my back up was the site at number one -
Work at Home - company scotland seo directory
www.easywebcreator.com/workathome0/company%20scotland%20seo

This is basically a directory search result on a site that advertises franchise businesses and is crammed full of Adsense ads and padded out with Google News items. But that’s not what really bugged me. If you visit that page go and view the source code and look at the meta-keywords tag. For those of a non-technical disposition or who would rather not visit it I’ll describe it. I copied it into a Word document to check the number of characters. It filled 9 pages! It has 5622 words, and 41,653 characters!! These include such relevant terms as “abraham lincoln”, “angelina jolie”, “Black Sabbath”, and yes, you guessed it “Britney Spears”.

This is what the world’s most popular search engine thinks is the most relevant site for “Scottish SEO consultant”. A company full of the finest brains in the world who spend enormous amounts of time devising methods of catching spam, and they can’t find a page which has a keywords tag full of total unmitigated spam.

Matt Cutts, are you listening?!!! Because as long as this sort of stuff is not only allowed through the indexes but actually gets to the top of search results your appeals for webmasters to do stuff like add “nofollow” to links are totally laughable. It undermines any chance of ethical SEOs nudging our clients in the right direction towards quality sites.

I’m off to find another keyboard, this one’s got a dent in it.

Ok, confession time first, I find the whole Web 2.0 thing a bit of a joke. The cute Ajax gimmicks, the jumbo-sized ‘kids play model’ look that makes you wonder if your screen’s reverted to 800×600, the DTP-circa-1998 graphics. Some of the interactivity is useful but a lot of it reeks of bandwagon jumping.

Anyway, this isn’t really about that Web 2.0, it’s about the financial and marketing fraternity’s idea of Web 2. The massive adverting industry that’s grown up around social networking interaction and the ever expanding ecommerce sector which reportedly threatens to close the high street shops for good.

With the current banking crisis knocking economic and financial confidence we’ve started to see reports speculating about some big net companies - AOL seem to be a favourite target - going into decline and triggering another dot.com crash which will see IT and marketing budgets plummet.

If such a crash were to happen then what is your best response if you have an online business? Naturally it depends on whether your business is one that might suddenly vanish, but assuming you still have potential customers then the only sensible thing to do is not to cut your marketing spend but to ensure that it is going to get you through the long haul. Good SEO, in the true sense of the phrase, is vital to your survival. A site that is fundamentally strong and well structured will outlast the get rich quick merchants because it will give users a positive experience and attract good rankings because of it. If buyers are scarce it matters even more to convert as many visitors as possible because it’s a lot easier to increase conversion percentages than to attract a hundred times as many more visitors.

Get yourself a good experienced SEO who will look at all aspects of your website and advise you on the total experience that you’re presenting to users as well as search engines. Not the wildly-promising one-note players who will tell you that ranking is all about a single parameter - such as links. If there is a downturn then there are likely to be casualties and therefore more space for the quality sites to rise to the top. Investing in quality advice now will help you to survive and prosper in difficult times, if they do appear.

Either someone at Google has a sense of humour or they really are out to make robots of us all. Let’s hope the former is the reason for calling their latest venture Android. This is the apparent reality behind all the long running rumours of a Google Phone. In fact it appears to be an attempt to bring an open standard operating system to enable extensible gadgets and capabilities for internet-capable phones.

Such a system would have great attractions for a company that wants to put itself into every aspect of communications and potential advertising media, but the move must have a lot of phone manufacturers wondering what their long term chances of survival are. Can any of them afford to go it alone or is it a case or collaborate or die. Or will Google just take over anyway? It’s also another battleground for Microsoft who have been trying to push the use of their own mobile operating system in a market that currently has quite a few of them.