feddy.ca

I have been busy at work recently so I do not have my next post in my series on the components of a website ready.  I will get the next post in that series up in the next couple weeks.  In the meantime, there were some very valuable posts from Google and Microsoft this past week that provide reinforcement of many of the concepts I write about and get asked about frequently.

Google’s Webmaster Central blog has produced a number of good basic instructional videos on topics such as discoverability, accessibility and ranking as well as Webmaster Central and other tools in this post.  These videos provide very short, easy to understand explanations of these topics and related information.  The Live Search Webmaster Center Blog also has posts on Webmaster Guidelines and Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains with information from presentations from the SMX East 2008 conference.

When you are just getting started with a website, I find these short, simple explanations right from the search engines helps reinforce an understanding of why administrators recommend certain methods.  This helps create the right expectations from new site owners as to how they will be discovered and ranked by the search engines.

Published today was a summary of Google’s consistent policy over buying and selling links. It is worth pointing out to site owners. A frequently asked question by someone with a “big idea” and wants their site up and running on the web in two weeks with loads of search engine traffic on launch day is “Can I buy links for search engine placement?”. Of course they can, but against my recommendation. If they choose to do so, I choose to not get involved with them. Some people just see money as a short cut and understand once they read the webmaster guidelines. Others could care less about the rules, they are more interested in gaming the system and trying to get away with it. I think that effort is much better spent elsewhere.

Much of the anti-Google sentiments on the web I believe is from site owners who provide no value whatsoever, and are still trying to eke out revenue from link doping or other paid for links strategies as were employed over five years ago (Remember searching on a topic and ending up on a page full of links that had no relevance to your search in terms of actual content? See examples of today’s methods). Google is not the monopolistic dictator in this regard protecting big business/themselves as is often portrayed. There is a universal desire among all search engines to protect their indexes’ PageRank or equivalent from manipulation from paid links. I commend the search engines proactive work in this area, keeping their indexes unpolluted and user trustworthy. I feel the whole Internet becomes much less useful if the search engines were ever contaminated this way.