We’re back from SES Milan!

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

We’re back from SES Milan!…with a couple of clarifications.

Ciao everybody! We just got back from Italy—great weather there, I must say! We attended
SES in Milan
on the 29th and 30th of May. The conference was a great opportunity to talk to many of you. We
really had a good time and want to thank all the people who stopped by to simply say “hi” or to
talk to us in more detail about search engine strategies. This gave us a chance to talk to many
participants and many of the big Italian actresses and actors in the SEO and web marketing worlds.
We discussed recent developments in the Italian internet market, SEO strategies and evangelizing.

A number of you have raised interesting questions, and we’d like to go through two of these in
more detail.

This is a situation a webmaster might find themself in: I optimized this site using some sneaky
techniques that are not in accordance with Google’s
Webmaster Guidelines. I got away with it for a while and it
helped me to rank in second position for certain keywords. Then, suddenly, I got an
email from Google
saying my site has been banned from the index because of those techniques (in these emails there
is always an example of one of the infractions found). I now have cleaned up the site and after
some days the site was back in the index. Why on earth doesn’t my site rank in the second position
anymore, even though I’ve already paid for the sneaky techniques we used?

OK, before answering let me ask you a couple of questions:

• Didn’t you optimize your site with those techniques in order to artificially boost the ranking?
• Didn’t you think those techniques had worked out (in a short term perspective at least)?

So, if there has been spamming going on, we encourage a site that has gotten an email from Google
to take this notification seriously. Many people clean up their sites after receiving a
notification from us. But we must also take into account that besides the shady SEO techniques
used on a particular site (for instance hidden text, redirecting doorway pages, etc) there are
often off-site SEO techniques used such as creating artificial link popularity in order to gain
a high position in Google’s SERPs.

So, to make it straightforward, once those manipulations to make a site rank unnaturally high are
removed, the site gains the position it merits based on its content and its natural link
popularity. Note that of course the ranking of your site also depends on other sites related to
the same topic and these sites might have been optimized in accordance to our guidelines, which
might affect the ranking of your site.

Note that a site does not keep a stain or any residual negative effect from a prior breach of our
webmaster guidelines, after it has been cleaned up.

That is why we first and foremost recommend to work hard on the content made for the audience of
your site, as the content is a decisive factor for building natural link popularity. We all know
how powerful a strong natural link popularity can be.

Search quality, content quality and your visitor’s experience.

During our conversations about search-related issues, another topic that came up frequently was
landing pages and writing for search engines, which are often related when we consider organic
search results.

So, think of your visitors who have searched for something with Google and have found your page.
Now, what kind of welcome are you offering? A good search experience consists of finding a page
that contains enough information to satisfy your original query.

A common mistake in writing optimized content for search engines is to forget about the user and
focus only on that particular query. One might say, that’s how the user landed on my page!

At the end of that day, exaggerating this attitude might lead to create pages only made to satisfy
that query but with no actual content on them. Such pages often adopt techniques such as, among
others, mere repetition of keywords, duplicate content and overall very little value. In general,
they might be in line with the keywords of the query – but for your visitor, they’re useless. In
other words, you have written pages solely for the search engine and you forgot about the user. As
a result, your visitor will find a page apparently on topic but totally meaningless.

These “meaningless” pages, artificially made to generate search engine traffic, do not represent a
good search experience. Even though they do not employ other not recommendable techniques, such
as for examples hidden text and links, they are very much made solely for the purpose of ranking
for particular keywords, or a set of keywords, but actually are not offering a satisfying search
result in itself.

A first step to identify if you are causing a bad search experience for your visitor consists of
checking that the pages that they find are actually useful. They will have topical content, that
satisfies the query for which your visitor has found it and are overall meaningful and relevant.
You might want to start with the pages that are most frequently found and extend your check up to
your entire site. To sum up, as general advice, even if you want to make a page that is easily
found via search engines, remember that the users are your audience, and that a page optimized
for the search engine does not necessarily meet the user’s expectations in terms of quality and
content. So if you find yourself writing content for a search engine, you should ask yourself what
the value is for the user!

Posted by Luisella and Stefano, Search Quality Team, Dublin