SEO Crunch

Look on just about any Webmaster or Blogger forum or blog these days and you’ll find thousands, if not millions, of posts and threads about how to please Google or calling the Big G, as the company has not too affectionately been dubbed, the most vile and evil company in the history of commerce.

Sound harsh? Perhaps so, but most estimates are that Google is responsible for over 60 percent of search traffic today and Adsense is a viable source of income for most owners of content web sites today, so the paranoia and hyperbole is probably well enough deserved!

So, how does the smart Webmaster or Blogger get into the good graces of Big G in an attempt to get content indexed so that visitors find his or her web pages?

For starters, despite the scaremongering and penalties for paid links being doled out like so many school demerits these days, Google was founded on and still relies heavily on the algorithms developed back in 1999 by Page and Brin, which essentially ranks web pages based on nothing more significant than popularity.

And so, like a bunch of fisherman gathered at the same fishing hole, we Webmasters cast our lines, all hoping to hook a big keyword and reel in the number one SERP in our chosen niche. We write great content, put up shiny pictures, videos, keywords and whatever link bait we can think of, just to catch a little more traffic.

That’s right; if your web site has a lot of back links, especially from sites that are content relative, then you stand a good chance of being well indexed by the behemoth of search. But just try putting your best content on a freshly registered domain and watch it sink with despair in the sandbox, with hardly a visitor able to discover the gems it holds.

Those who with the insight to start publishing content and peddling their wares years ago have the huge advantage, since Google’s algorithm seems sure to give more authority to older domain names and those with a ton of incoming links, which it deems to be “votes of popularity” and sees as more worthy of top SERPs than those without.

Ironically, although the algo is supposed to provide the Big G users with “superior search results”, one can find countless examples of top SERPs given to pages with worthless content, shameless product promotions and Made for Adsense sites dangled before searchers like so much stinking shark bait.

Recently, we tried an experiment to prove this point and, without revealing the URLs, for fear of the penalties and because no self-respecting Webmaster will reveal his best SERPs, we can say that if somebody invents a more intelligent search algorithm than Big G’s, he may well do to Google what Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the young Stanford geeks, did to Yahoo, Excite and others only a few short years ago! Yes, the time is soon for a new and improved answer to producing the results searchers deserve.

And so we set out to test whether Google Bots and the legendary algo of Page and Brin’s genius could really sort the wheat from the chafe. Choosing two sites in our portfolio, one aged and having significant backlinks and the other, a fairly new site in the same niche and with similar content, we published two versions of the same article, containing the same well-researched keywords, on both sites.

On the one with high PageRank, tons of great search results and thousands of backlinks, we published a poorly written and relatively trite version of the article. And on the fresh site we posted a polished, spectacular and highly specific version.

Care to guess the results? Hardly a surprise of course; the “popular” site ranked highly for several of the keywords, while the ugly duckling site with the far better version got nothing higher than page four search results for the same keywords.

Take no pity on the poor Webmaster who toils away for hour on end to make good content available; he deserves no recognition from you or the Big G. But what about the poor searchers who rely on Google to take them to the promised land when searching for something as important as their next HDTV flat screen television or trying to find the latest spring fashions or a good article on how to lose weight, find a Wordpress plugin or perhaps looking for information on how to become a successful Blogger?

While they hope to find the content we published on our fresh site, all they will get from the Big G is a pile of garbage because that version is on the more “popular” site.

So, our conclusion is indeed that Google is a hard taskmaster; both to the Webmaster and to the unsuspecting searcher who has been brainwashed by the hype into thinking the answers to all their questions, the links to the best web sites, can be found by entering there query into the Big G search box!

Now that Google is gaining so many haters in the Webmaster community, to whom they owe a fair portion of their fantastic wealth and success, the tide may turn slowly away, leaving the doors open for a new competitor to come along finally, with a pure and simply better search algorithm and an attitude that Webmasters and searchers alike begin to prefer over the Big G.

CEO Eric Schmidt has said repeatedly that Google doesn’t care to own content, but prefers the strategy of guiding users to content instead. And nobody can deny the strategy has paid huge dividends, making Google the fastest growing company of all time. Well, so far at least.

But despite wooing many of the most talented software engineers and employing thousands of brain-bigger-than-a-planet minds, Google still apparently has no better way of judging the actual value and quality of content than how many links there are to a given web page or site!

This all seems a sad affair and, rather than intimidating Webmasters, what Google really ought to concentrate on is how to distinguish good content from utter garbage and rank pages accordingly. Then, they might not have to piss off the Webmaster community with threats against paid links and paid links could once and all go the way of the buggy whip!

If you like this post, please let us know. If you think its complete bullshit, don’t be afraid to tell everyone. Your comments are appreciated either way on our little web site that nobody knows and Google hasn’t confined to banishment. Yet anyway …