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Search Engine Optimization
The Current State of the Industry
From about 2000 to November 2003, achieving a fairly high
search engine position was fairly straight forward for those
who knew how to do it. However this was all to change on November
23rd 2003 when the whole game was turned upside down.
At this time, Google, clearly the market leader totally changed
the way it ranked its' websites. Fed up with too many low
value but money making websites dominating the top results,
Google decided to declare war on the spammer. What resulted
was many websites totally disappearing from the results and
a totally unexplainable search engine ranking algorithm. This
erratic behaviour went on for a few months, changing again
notably in January 2004.
Over the coming months, the algorithm improved, however it
was absolutely clear that the whole game of search engineering
had completely changed and no longer was it possible to 'engineer'
sites of questionable value to the top of the pile. In some
cases, people achieved it, but in nearly all cases they were
caught up with and lost their positions.
We are now nearly 2 years on and we are little wiser as to
what criteria Google places on websites to rank them highly.
What is clear is that the emphasis is far more on quality
and useful information rather than having all the right 'tags'
in the right places. What has emerged is an extremely complicated
algorithm that measures a site's importance by the quality
of links into, the ease of navigation and particularly the
information contained within it. Clearly, if a website can
demonstrate that it is a total authority in it's field, then
it deserves to have a higher place within the search results.
I am still amazed to see other search engine optimization
firms offering guarantees of top placements within Google
/ Yahoo etc when it is totally impossible to do so. If you
are in the position of looking for a SEO firm, it is more
beneficial in the long run if they can be realistic as to
what is possible rather than promise unlikely outcomes to
secure the deal.
One thing is for sure in today's SEO climate: Results may
take longer to achieve, but playing by the rules of the search
engine and building a site around quality content, links and
structure will yield a far better and solid long term return
Phil Crawshay
Managing Director - August 2005
© 2005, no-6.co.uk limited
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