The Google-shuffle

A lot of people talk about search engine optimization. But what does that term mean exactly? In my opinion there are two types of optimization- moral and immoral. Moral optimization involves adding meta tags with descriptions and keywords, giving pictures alt tags, keeping the text crisp and precise, making sure textual links work well, and basically make the site easy to use for humans as well as robot web crawlers. Immoral optimization, on the other hand, involves same colour text to blend with the background to increase keywords, scores and scores of keywords in the meta tags so many that the page actually takes up to 1000 times longer to load than the content you get to see should take, it involves links which go nowhere, multiple domain names going to the same place, multiple domain names going to different places but the same site, and generally making the site terrible for the average human viewer. Getting a good ranking in a search engine is not worth customer dissatisfaction. When you get a visitor to the site you want to keep them there, its no good if they leave straight away.

Google is by far the most widely used search engine on the internet today. So inevitably I often get asked "why aren't we ranking high in Google?", or "how can we rank better in Google?" Google is not like other search engines. At the moment anyway, Google is more interested in morals than advertising dollars. This could change in the future of course, but this is the situation at present. Every month Google changes its algorithmic pathways on its servers- meaning it changes what it looks for when searching websites. This is called the Google Shuffle. Now, some people make a living out of trying to guess what this change will be, and modifying, or 'optimizing' their sites respectively. Google is very anti 'optimizers' in the immoral sense at least and makes every effort to rid the internet of those sites. Its primary goal is USEFULNESS. So my policy on Google, is submit the site, and let them do their job. Some search engines have clear algorithms they use and there is no problem optimizing sites to rank well in them. But Google didn't become the best by being like the rest, so one must treat them differently. Google isn't about advertising- have a look. No pop ups, and minimal ad space. What Google wants is clean, legitimate, and above all useful websites in its index. Risk optimizing with Google and you risk being removed from their database, or kicked even further down the list. When they notice a site spamming their index, they include features peculiar to that site in next months algorithms. This can include links on your page to spamming sites, so careful who you link to.