Have Search Engines Made Black Hatters Out of Us All?
By Angela Charles For folks who have been working in search engine optimization a long time, the question posed above makes perfect sense.
It wasn't that long ago when sites could exchange reciprocal links,
buy links on link directories, post liberally to authoritative sites
like Wikipedia, and build web page content meeting a specific level of
keyword density to improve their search engine positioning. Do any of
these things today, and these practices could cause your site to be
penalized by the major search engines, preventing your site from ever
being found.
Now it seems, almost any tactic used to help the search engines
properly interpret a site's content and relevance to a given industry
can potentially backfire if deemed as "over-optimization." In search
engine optimization parlance, what many SEO firms cite as "white hat"
SEO practices arbitrarily are treated as "black hat" SEO by search
engines.
The search engines, most notably Google and of late, Yahoo, have
created a game of cat-and-mouse that has turned the science of search
engine optimization most definitely into an art.
It's not as simple as taking an SEO checklist and methodically
making changes to a site according to prescribed formulas. By today's
standards, following any specified formula is likely to cause your site
to become ensnared in a search engine's over-optimization net.
It's not a matter of SEO firms sliding in practice over time from
white to gray to black hat. Legitimate SEO practitioners understand
pretty well what the black hat methods are and avoid them easily.
Rather, it's more about the search engines working extra hard to
maintain control over their search results, or as I would call it
"managed chaos."
The upshot is that any company that relies on search engine
positioning to generate traffic to their site needs to be extremely
diligent in monitoring its site's position as well as documented
changes in search engine algorithms. You'll never stay ahead of the
game; rather, just try to stay in it. The trick is to be able to
identify when a sudden drop in position is the result of a new,
permanent over-optimization penalty or a temporary snag in search
engine rankings.
For instance, recently a change on Google labeled the -6 penalty
caused sites that had been performing on the first page of Google to
drop 5 positions (i.e. from No. 1 to No. 6). Google engineer Matt Cutts
has since explained on his blog that this penalty was an unintended
consequence of some recent anti-spam programming, but that the search
engine is working to undo the damage for legitimately optimized sites.
The average marketing person managing his or her company web site
along with their other duties likely doesn't have time to stay on top
of which search engine changes are important to their site's continued
positioning. And, in the grand scheme of things, it may not be the best
use of their time even if they could. It's difficult to determine how
and when to make optimization changes when you're operating in the
vacuum of managing only one site.
Perhaps that's where the biggest value lies in working with an
experienced SEO firm. It might seem that you're paying more than if you
had an in-house person take care of your search engine optimization,
but you're gaining expertise for which you are not directly paying.
By working with multiple clients, SEO firms get a feel for what
works with the search engines. They may uncover a positioning problem
with one client and then develop a strategy to preemptively help your
site. It's about applying lessons learned, modifying SEO techniques as
search engines make adjustments, and keeping that white hat from being
labeled as black.
Angela Charles is president of Pilot Fish, an Akron, Ohio web design and search engine optimization firm that specializes in business-to-business web sites. |
