Are you a spammer?

I know what you are thinking: “Of course I’m not – I go by the book, providing quality content on my site and getting backlinks in the most ethical way possible.”

Yeah, okay, fair enough. However, if you do any sort of link-building at all, you are artificially inflating your popularity and that is what Google is trying to stop. If you own a site, it’s unlikely that you have never dropped a link somewhere with the intention of appearing more popular in the search engines.

But don’t feel bad, this isn’t something that you created. It is all down to the fact that the search engines really don’t have any way to gauge popularity, other than tallying the amount, and quality, of links you get. Of course, this has lead to wide-spread abuse and attempts to game the system. Unfortunately, if you want any chance at all of competing, you are going to have to play the same game.

But that is not how Google sees it. For the life of me, I can’t understand how a company that employs some of the brightest minds in the industry can be so short-sighted. The official stance on this is that you should have content that is so good, other webmasters are going to want to link to it. Seriously?

Seriously?

I own several sites and I don’t feel compelled to link to an article, just because I enjoyed it and got value from it. The exception being that I may link to a relevant source to back up an argument I am trying to make. Very rarely do I link to something because I think it is good. Maybe that is just me, but I don’t think so.

And the fact that they give a keyword anchor more value than a link that simply says, “click here” is extremely short-sighted and naïve. Even if you are lucky enough to get a legitimate link from another webmaster, what are the chances that you are going to get your exact keyword in the anchor. Unless you ask for it, of course – but then, it ceases to become a true, unsolicited link.

Hmm…….

I have been in this business for a number of years now and I believe that I can say with relative certainty, that you can have the best site in the world, with nothing but Pulitzer prize winning content, and you are not going to rank for much if no one knows you exist.

The “build it and they will come” model is tragically flawed.

In fact, the sites that are ranking on the top are the ones who push the envelope and go out there and get links. Do a search for any popular keyword and I guarantee that the sites ranking near the top (unless they are well known authority sites) are gaming the system by engaging in link building. In some cases, they are outright spamming, but they are still in the top 10.

Take a look at some of those sites, read an article or two, and get a feel for the quality of the content. Don’t be surprised if you find that a lot of it is written on a grade 3 level by illiterates, or people for whom English is a second or third language. That is what is taking up first place, while the really great content is buried on the 10th page because that webmaster has more ethics or simply doesn’t know how to generate spammy links.

What is wrong with this picture?

Unfortunately, nothing is going to change until the search engines are able to get a better grasp on who really deserves top spot and who has the best, and most relevant content for the search term the user typed in. In order to do that, they are going to have to be able to assess quality like humans do, and that is a long way off.

From Google’s perspective, this is the holy grail of their industry. Any company that is able to do this is going to dominate.

For the time being, as site owners, we are left to slug it out in the trenches with the spammers, scammers, and cheaters as we try to get our good content noticed – and hopefully ranked. We are forced to create our own fortune by making sure that we get as many links out there as possible. We are forced to artificially inflate our popularity in order to compete. The search engines have created this playing field and we, as unwitting participants, are forced to play the game, or be left in the dust.

This is the biggest problem with the internet today. Not only for legitimate webmasters trying to get traffic to their site, but for the people who are actually doing the searching. The criteria to rank on the first page should be the quality of the information and how relevant it is to the search term. Instead, the deciding factor seems to be who is able to get the most links out there. That forces the rest of us to waste time manipulating links, instead of writing the quality content that should be on page one in the first place.

In my opinion, two things have to happen: The search engines have to be able to assess quality and they also need to gauge popularity. Even if they could assess quality, it is not enough. You can have a technically perfect article, but if it puts the reader to sleep halfway through, you don’t want it in top spot. That is why they also have to take into account popularity. If an article is popular, that means that the majority of people love it. It means that the material holds their attention and provides some sort of entertainment value as well as factual, well-written information. That is what you want one page one.

The good news is that Google and company are working on using bounce rate as a part of their formula for ranking a site. If you have 95% of your readers bailing on you after 30 seconds, then there is a good chance that the material is not that great. The real problem is that it means that you have to install something like Google Analytics on as many sites as you can – and many do not have it installed. That is the problem they face at the moment – should a site be penalized because it does not use analytics?

So, yeah, they are making some progress, but for the time being, all they can rely on is link popularity and that is not a good thing for someone who wants to do things by the book. After all, most of us are here to make money, and the only ones doing that at the moment are the people creating their own links.

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Filed under: The Search Engines

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