Web Moves Blog

When We Really Worked For The Money
I remember when a website wanted to be found it had to adhere to the rules and algorithms for Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Webcrawler, OpenText, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo! and Northern Light. An entire industry was born from the need to satisfy the demand to get into those search engines because each had its own algorithms, indexing and ranking criteria.

Someone needed to know how each engine worked, how each directory worked, how to make pages that would be indexed by each of them, where to put them so they were separate from the versions that needed to meet the requirements of another engine, keyword density, how often to submit, how to read search engine logs, how to track indexed pages, how to track visitors, how to build meta tags, how to construct a page so that crawlers could navigate JavaScript, what dynamic links couldn’t be crawled, FLASH workarounds, frames workarounds, MSFrontPage code workarounds and then the killer skill of all, how to get a page to rank well and beat the competition.

A lot of us come from that time when our skills were worth gold and in high demand. Without our help, there was little hope of ever getting into a search engine unless you had money to buy ad space. Without our guidance, many Directory editors would not have received quality sites to review. I would spend on average an hour per site description writeup for Yahoo! alone because inclusion was not guaranteed and they had certain criteria to be met.

Then Yahoo! introduced a fee per URL. Everyone else followed suit except Google and DMOZ (of the top guns.)

Show Me the Money, You Big Hunk of Corporation
Today, the only player anyone seems concerned with is Google, which costs nothing to be indexed. You don’t even have to submit your site because if other sites link to it, Google will find it. If you want better exposure, Google will accept your money for their Google Ads program, which seems only fair until you learn how much competitive keywords will cost you.

Several Search Engines merged with Directories and now we have Search Portals, including Yahoo! (which always was a Directory and Engine). There’s little discussion on how to get into them. Meanwhile they’re dying or still merging (like FAST/Lycos). Trying to decide whether or not to bother with getting into them and paying their fees is about as exciting as driving around town looking for a gas station that will save me 3 cents per gallon. After awhile it doesn’t seem worth the worry or effort, especially when spunky Google brings the most traffic and indexes my entire website for free.

Intro.
During the middle to late 1990’s the popular term for getting web pages into search engines was “website promotion” instead of today’s “search engine optimization” or “search engine marketing”, otherwise known as SEO/SEM.

Recently inspired by Cre8asiteForums.com topics fielding questions such as “What is SEO” and “Does SEO=SPAM?”, I reviewed my old SEO work files to remind myself what it was like when search engines meant there were at least 10 of them to worry about. Today, the emphasis is on Google. Years ago a webmaster was faced with the shock of learning their website just might not get into search engines at all because, low and behold, search engines weren’t created to work with all types of web pages.

For example, frames. How many people loved them, only to abandon them when they learned crawlers ignored them?

Another example is links. Deep crawlers spidered links. This presented problems. What if your site was graphic intensive? How would it be added to an index unless you submitted each page separately? This gave rise to software that could submit pages by the thousands, to which the search engines responded by blocking IPs.

The link issue brought forth doorways, hallways, and gateway pages of just links because for some websites this was their only hope of getting into search engines without spending a lot of money. It became necessary to devise all means to attract spiders, and from this it was learned that those pages worked so well that search engines began to shut down any domain that relied on them.

Search Engines aren’t the only ones who created their own mess. Yahoo! started out by listing websites alphabetically, not by relevancy. People found they could take advantage of this by putting symbols and the letter “A” at the beginning of their title tag or company name. This got their website listed higher, whether it was worthy or not.

Don’t Bite The SEO That Feeds You
Search Engine Optimization is a skillset that complimented and serviced the search industry, at no charge to them. We counsel clients on how to purchase ads for better exposure, thereby delivering revenue to their doorstep. We studied their FAQs and guided clients on how to adhere to those FAQs. There were times I wanted to plaster that Yahoo! FAQ on a client’s forehead and make them repeat after me – “We have the right to change anything. We have the right to refuse your site. We have the right to put your site wherever the heck we want.” Because if I didn’t make them read it, they would ignore it altogether and get upset with Yahoo! when things didn’t go their way. Or, worse, blame me.

Rank is where the road we traveled turned the ugly corner.

Search engines do not know how to effectively sort and filter those billions of pages they index. Google turned it into a popularity contest, which was easy to take advantage of – so people do.

Before Google was introduced, it was learned how easy it was to play head games with servers and crawlers and so cloaking, redirects, etc. were created by some people in the SEO industry. These tactics were devised because the search portals were not delivering what they promised. And how could they? What is the definition of “relevant”, “quality”, “popular” anyway? When 100 websites are ALL relevant, quality and popular, WHAT NEXT?

Pay for rank. We may have to get past the idea that just because a site paid for the number one spot doesn’t mean it isn’t also worthy of being there and we may have to get used to really ugly sites being in that same number one spot simply because they have the money to be there. We will have to click to decide relevancy and not take an engine’s word for it anymore. We can no longer be satisfied co-dependent search engine users.

We All Had Good Intentions For Breakfast
It’s my feeling that my work with search engine optimization began as a “search engine helpdesk” role. It was about promoting pages TO search sites and teaching clients how to get in the door of each one. For my part, my Cre8pc.com site offered much of this assistance for free as a devoted labor of love project.

When submission methods to search portals became fee-based, the need for my help seemed less vital. But, the other sister industry, Search Engine Rank (SER, my term) is booming. It’s faced with trying to work with search technology that’s still inventing itself, as in the recent Yahoo!/Google “blended” results.

The need for SEO will remain as long as the technology struggles with images, frames, FLASH, and dynamic data base-driven sites, and as long as competition is alive and well on the Internet. Unfortuntely Search Portals seem focused on devising roadblocks to submission practices which were developed to help sites that must compete in a global environment because the present solution for ranking sites isn’t working. It’s like applying a band-aid on a cut that won’t heal because there’s always new ways to re-injure it.

I’d like to see a fair, affordable-to-all-websites ranking and indexing system developed for an environment of many cultures, languages, and user demands such as ecommerce, research, blogs, personal pages and news. Google, nor any other search company, hasn’t found the answer yet (although Google has the best so far). In the meantime there’s millions of websites pounding on the doors, some of whom will locate a savvy programmer who will find a way to unlock those doors because they see the loopholes and errors in theory, and companies willing to hire them.

Author Bio:
Written by Kimberly Krause Cre8pc Edited by Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com