Read Part 2 of 2: Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines
“If you build it, they will come”, these words from Ray Kinsella in the movie Field of Dreams ring hollow in today’s Internet world. The big challenge for today’s Internet marketers is that ensuring that your site is the one being visited in the vast ocean of Internet web sites is no simple matter.
On the flip side of the Internet marketing coin is the average consumer surfing the web. Always searching for something, consumers have turned to the Internet for significant percentage of their shopping needs, or at least for learning about products or services they will later purchase off-line. Finding relevant information, as I personally discover as one of these consumers is not a simple matter either.
Between these two groups stands one gigantic gate-keeper, namely Google (and to a lesser extent, Yahoo and MSN). Google did not invent Internet search or search marketing. In the early days of the Internet, there was Yahoo, Infoseek, Lycos, Alta-Vista, and scores of other smaller search engines. As consumers do today, they also tried (much more unsuccessfully) to find relevant information on the web.
Search engines had to ensure that when a consumer searched for something, that they would find the most relevant sites as quickly as possible (in other words, above the fold on the first page of the result set). Because search engines have always had to determine site relevance to the search query using a scalable, consistent algorithm, Internet marketers have always tried to crack the algorithm in order to get their sites as close as possible to the top.
The tug-of-war that has begun in the dawn of the Internet and continues to this day unabated is between search engines trying to provide the most relevant sites to the consumer searching for something and the marketers trying to get their, possibly not-so-relevant sites in front of those consumers. This means that Internet marketers are basically playing the cat-and-mouse game with the search engines, trying to game their unpublicized algorithms.
In the early days, this involved Internet marketers stuffing important keywords in the meta tags and in the body of the page. At the time, search engine algorithms assumed that sites played “fair” and any site that is most relevant to the query would have the right keywords in the right places. Marketers, however, have figured it out and quickly gamed search engines by placing enough keywords in the body of the pages to get their irrelevant sites resulting high in consumer queries.
Resulting frustration by consumers with existing search engines gave rise to Google which had figured out a new and different algorithm for search. Google figured that any site with links pointing to it has to be more relevant than a site with fewer links pointing to it. Cat and mouse games continued with marketers setting up link farms between irrelevant sites in the attempt to game the new Google algorithm. Google figured this out and has modified its algorithm to include a complex set of requirements for any site to become important enough to be listed high on search query results. While the Google search rank algorithm is guarded as closely as the formula to Coke, it is commonly accepted that the algorithm involves weighting of sites based on a number of criteria, some of which are:
1. Quantity of back links from other “important” sites,
2. Uniqueness of content,
3. Frequency of content change,
4. How long as the site been around and had items 1-3 above satisfied.
And this brings us to the most recent battle between Internet marketers and the search engines and to the recent headline-generating entrants in the space of Internet marketing: PayPerPost and ReviewMe.
How these two products play in the new cat-and-mouse game between the Internet marketers and the search engines will be the subject of Part 2 of 2: Cat and Mouse Games With Search Engines.
Gene Kavner, Former World-Wide Director, Amazon Associates Affiliate Program, 2005-2006.
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