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Dirty Tactics of Search Engine Optimization Revealed and What the Future Might Hold for SEO

Posted By admin On February 13, 2011 9:07 PM In | No Comments

An interesting article from the New York Times caught my attention while I was looking at my Twitter feed.  It was about the dirty secrets of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is the first time I have a seen a major publication write about SEO and reveal from a more technical perspective how it all works.  The article was on how a retailer's SEO company manipulated Google’s algorithm to rank #1 in many relevant keyword searches during the critical holiday shopping period.  The basic tactic that was being used was building inbound links to their site through other computer generated sites that would link to the retailer's site.  This is a big no no in the eyes of the Google, but it can take them awhile to catch on to these “dirty little tactics”.

 
In simple terms, Google rankings are based on how many inbound links from other sites a web site receives.  If a site has a lot of inbound links it is then thought to be a pretty good resource so it should rank well on keyword searches relevant to your site.  Moreover, Google places a tremendous amount of emphasis if a site has inbound links from sites they think are authorities (examples would be the NY Times, CNN.com, etc).  Another analogy someone once told me is to think of web sites as being in high school and you want as many inbound links from senior sites.  Just think back to when you were a freshman and really wanted to be friends with the popular seniors.  In many respects this is how the web works. In search engine industry terms we call getting an inbound link from a popular (senior site) link juice.   

Now while there are shady tactics that can be used, with one of them being computer generated inbound links, at some point Google will catch on, as they did with this site and eventually bury the site in searches -- which they have done.   The fact is building quality links to your site is not something that can ever be promised or done overnight.  It is earned and your site has to be around for awhile.  Either that or you have to know some pretty important people that might be able to give you instant link juice with a high quality inbound link to your site, which is why Google gives it such great weight in its algorithms.  It means over time your site is part of a community, and you are also creating great content that people want to link to. 

 
And this all brings me back to a recent blog post I wrote about on Twitter.  Something that I think will start happening is Google giving pages higher page rank based on how often they have been tweeted by the people tweeting the information and by tweets coming from people with high Klout  scores.  If you use a tool like HootSuite for Twitter you will notice when you view someone’s profile, a Klout score appears.  This is a measure of social influence across the web based on followers and how often you are tweeting, among other things. I view this something like Google’s old Page Rank, which would indicate how important they thought your site was based on the inbound links coming to the site.  Google has since done away with Page Rank, but back in the day if you had a Page Rank above 6 your site was doing very well.  With Klout the scale runs from 1 to 100 and the higher your score the better.
 
Not only is this something I think we will see coming, but it will also guard against shady SEO tactics, because as we have seen they can still be manipulated.  However, by building someone’s social media influence that is something that cannot be easily replicated by a computer.  Sure there are spammers on social networking sites, but they would not carry the same influence as a real, verified Twitter account or a Facebook profile. More importantly, it also speaks to the community aspect of the web, because we will follow people on social media based on our interests and our friends.  

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