I had conversation recently with the owner of a locksmith regarding his website. He was proud to tell me his nephew installed this nifty software that pings the search engines repeatedly to trick them into thinking…whatever.
He proudly states his site is always in the top three search results list. I cautioned him that search engines are unforgiving and he may be doing himself more harm than good by performing trickery.
So we looked up his site using the search terms to be most likely entered: Locksmith, Johns Island. He came up nowhere on the first few pages, much to his chagrin.
I hated to say I told you so… nah, I didn’t. The lesson here is clear. Don’t be clever; be wise.
A well-written site with pertinent and refreshed content buys you deserved page rankings. Not convinced? Read below:
Google Changes Algorithm for Low Quality Sites
In an attempt to offer its users better search results, Google has just implemented a significant change to its algorithm. The change will help boost the rankings of what are deemed to be high quality sites, and it will push low quality sites, such as content farms, further down the rankings. Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, a principal engineer who helps the search engine giant fight spam, announced the algorithmic improvement in a post on Google’s blog. The changes main goal is to improve relevancy among search results for users. By rewarding high quality sites for their content and punishing low quality sites for their supposed lack of content, users can get more of what they are looking for without having to weed through irrelevant sites. Google considers high quality sites to be those that offer original content, in-depth analysis, research, and more. Although the blog post did not name any specific websites, it is likely that content farms are its main target. Content farms produce short, low value articles that are created in response to popular search queries. One such site is eHow, which pays freelance writers small fees to produce short articles on a variety of subjects.”
Excerpted from: SEO CHAT; by wubayou 2011-02-28
