Welcome to the February 2003 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter!

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Search Engine Hazards

Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal lead story had an interesting reminder that there are dangers lurking everywhere -- even in the search engines. The story related the experiences of some website owners who suddenly found themselves banished from the Google search engine after they used some questionable search engine optimization techniques. In several cases the website owners simply signed up with one of the many services that promises great search engine results without realizing that their techniques would get the site banned. The subhead on the story is "Cat and Mouse," which I found particularly interesting because I have been describing the search engine industry to my clients as a cat and mouse game for the last couple of years.

The Search Engine Story

So what's really going on here? Let's see if I can reduce a long and complex story to a few paragraphs. From the beginning, search engines have promised users that they could find whatever they need on the web simply by typing in a few keywords. As anyone who has been using search engines for a while knows, they were only marginally successful for a long time. I still remember my frustration when I found that typing "Boston Website Designer" into AltaVista got me a list that included Joe's Bar and Grill in the number-3 spot.

Almost as soon as the search engines appeared, search engine consultants appeared, offering to get your website listed at the top of the search engines. For a while it was pretty simple -- add a few pieces of code (the META tags) with the right words in them and you were done. As the search engines developed more complex algorithms, the search engine consultants developed more complex techniques. Some were pretty brute-force: Want to sell a consumer product to young men? Put some suggestive words in the site, repeated many times, using a white font on a white background and your site will appear whenever these young men look for less-than-savory sites on the search engines (I'm being coy in my wording here because many email spam filters look for certain obvious words and ditch any emails containing them).

Cloaking

Then the game started getting rough. Techniques such as cloaking and doorway pages appeared. Reduced to their simplest form, these techniques show the search engines a different page from what they show the human audience. Most of the time this was done as an honest attempt to make it easier for the search engines to read the page. but occasionally the search engine page was totally different and was clearly aimed at getting the website listed where it had no business being listed. The search engines knew about this, of course (it's discussed pretty openly in the search engine forums), but turned a blind eye to it for a long time, in part because tracking down the perpetrators was more trouble than it was worth.

Some time ago Google, which is by far the largest search engine on the web, layed out the rules for everyone to see. One rule was that cloaking was forbidden and could lead to banishment from their database. Well, recently Google announced that they would actively enforce these rules. And they got some interesting help in this endeavor -- website owners who suspected their competitors were using questionable techniques to get placed higher in the search engines didn't hesitate to rat on them to Google.

There were, of course, howls of protest. A few even tried taking Google to court. But the courts have generally refused to get involved, taking the position that Google has publicly posted the rules it plans to live by and is merely doing what it promised to do.

So once you get banned, can you get back in? Yes, you can, but it's not easy, it's not cheap, and it's not quick. It requires completely removing the offending pages, appealing to Google (sometimes more than once), and then waiting -- possibly a long time -- for Google to come around.

Is there a better way?

Yes, there is, and it's frighteningly obvious -- make your web pages useful to both humans and search engines. Is it easy to do? Sure -- after you've sweated through the first 300-400 pages. I have been studying search engine issues for a couple of years now, and I have to admit to being amazed at the complexity of some of the issues involved. And it's not getting simpler.

I suspect you won't be surprised if I say here that the better way to approach the search engine problem is to talk to your friendly web developer BEFORE you sign up for any scheme that promises instant and fantastic results. Remember the rule that "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?" Your web developer's job is to know the difference between the techniques that are good and the techniques that are too good to be true. Call us first.

Thanks for joining us this month. See you next month.

Jonathan Spencer
CyberArtisans Web Developers

http://www.cyberartisans.com/
617-965-4110