Looking at search today it almost seems like google has lost focus on good



search results. The ongoing war against SE spam has changed search technology to

the extent that many legitimate webmasters are seeing their sites caught up by

friendly fire. Although in saying this many of the webmasters that cry the

loudest are the ones breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries. Google is

smart and plenty of people like to take pot shots at the tall poppy of the

search world but I would not want the responsibility of trying to manage and

police the worlds biggest search tool. When you look at what they have to

contend with in terms of spam in the form of scraper sites and massive amounts

of duplicate content, throw in data storage and crawling on an ever increasing

and uncharted scale and you are going to encounter many "issues" as you move

forward. The KISS (keep it simple stupid) theory is no longer in play here,

search technology is much more complex with new algorithms coming into play all

the time.

Looking around at SEO forums you

read all sorts of things about a google conspiracy and webmasters being forced

to buy adwords because they simply can't get the volume of traffic from organic

search any more. What many webmasters are seeing today is pages drop from the

google index on large scale and a constant shifting of the results across the

different google data centers, also large numbers of supplemental results being

reported for sites. Corresponding drops in traffic and very upset webmasters who

are caught in the fallout, in some ways Google is the victim of it's own

dominance as are the many webmasters who catch a cold when google has a sneeze.

Adwords is not the motive for the constant flux as has been suggested by a few,

when you examine things adwords needs it's network of partner sites to generate

traffic in order to keep the revenues flowing and of course good search

technology  results play a major part in the cycle. I don't think it is any more

complex than that. Because google is so dominant it's the greatest source of

free traffic in the world, this makes them the biggest target in the world which

in turn gives them the hardest job in the world. You can't keep all of the

people happy all of the time some blood is going to get spilled along the way.

The biggest enemy of the webmaster is the other webmaster busy putting together

a massive auto generated database driven spam site to flood the search engines.

 Is google winning the battle here? The latest series of google updates would

suggest to some extent yes they are making headway in some areas although as I

write this there are some strange results being served up from a lot of the

google data centers right now, we have been monitoring a few of the large spam

sites and one or two seem to have resurfaced during the current data push. This

I would expect to be only a temporary situation but it is a concern to see in

some sectors that good sites fall out of the rankings and sites of lesser

quality getting a reward even if it is only temporary. Google shoulders enormous

responsibility and the question of accountability is an interesting subject, if

google changes it's algorithm and the whole search world turns upside down the

effects can be far reaching and very damaging for online business, we are not

talking about small numbers here. Of course some would argue there are winners

and losers as the total number of searches remains about the same so if I am not

getting clicks then some other business is? Maybe this is the case but with

investment in infrastructure and stock and employees an online business needs to

consider it's reliance on organic search results and the revenue generated from

this otherwise you might just be caught without a chair when the music stops.

What we tell our clients is simple, build clean sites for your users with

original content - forget to a certain extent that a machine is going to crawl

your site and make it people friendly. Clean sites, clean code with good

intuitive link structure, good relative text this is very much a back to basics

approach but it works and the search engines will reward you. Don't fall for the

"we can get you to number 1 in google" trap, it's not a bad idea to stay away

form anyone who makes this promise because not one can guarantee a search

ranking. Use resources that benefit your users and don't try to cheat or

manipulate your position in the engines. Good

online marketing and promotion will

go along way. Look at all of your options for traffic generation and don't put

all of your eggs in the google basket!