By Carl Weiss
What’s it all about?
Having worked the web professionally
since 1995, I have seen a lot of changes over the past 18 years. Back in the beginning, all you needed to get on
page one of any search engine was a website.
This was in the days before blogs and social networks, before online video
too, since there wasn’t enough bandwidth to stream video. Search engine algorithms were pretty simple back
then as well. In fact, one of the easiest ways
to get on page one in the 90’s was to research sites already on page one, since
their code could be dissected and bested. This is one of the reasons that virtually every search engine was soon forced to start changing their algorithms on a regular basis. You see it wasn’t long before everybody started
to realize that you could beat the other site owners by stuffing more of the keywords
you were after onto the page. The crowd also
realized that while the sentence, “online casino, online casino, online casino,
online casino, online casino,” might get your site to the top of the heap, it wasn’t
going to please most visitors. This is when
sharp operators started making these stuffed sentences the same color as the background,
which meant that only the search engine spiders could read them.
Of course so could the webmasters
of the search engines. So they decided to
up the ante by having owners begin soliciting backlinks, figuring that this was
one way of showing the popularity of a website.
Within six months of this edict, entrepreneurs started spawning backlink
farms where any site owner could acquire hundreds or even thousands of backlinks
overnight. This rankled the powers that be
at the search engines since their spiders were not yet intelligent enough to detect
farmed backlinks from the real McCoy. However,
in the tit for tat world of search engine operators, it wasn’t long before the spiders
became ever more sophisticated.
Bear in mind that before Google
came onto the scene there were dozens of search engines that could provide viable
traffic to businesses. Even though there
were a number of well entrenched operators, no one yet held anything like a monopoly. What this meant is that if your site didn’t fare
well on one search engine, you could always move your operation to another, many
of which could be cracked in 24 hours. Once
the 800 lb gorilla in the room called Google went public, the game was changed and
not for the better.
Search Engine Market Share 1999
AltaVista:
15.5%
HotBot:
11.3%
MSN
Search: 8.5%
Infoseek:
8.0%
Google: 7.8%
Yahoo: 7.4%
Google: 7.8%
Yahoo: 7.4%
Excite:
5.6%
Lycos: 2.5%
Lycos: 2.5%
Google Gets Into the Game.
On August 19, 2004 Google went
public. By July of 2005, its market share
had grown to 30.5 percent of search. A year
after that, it control raised to 41.4 percent of search. By 2010 Google controlled 71 percent of search.
Yahoo by this point was down to less than 15 percent and Bing came in third with 9.3 percent. What this meant to site owners was that they were
now forced to answer the question, “What do you feed an 800 lb gorilla? Anything it wants.”
What Does Google Want?
What Google wants today is content
and lots of it. Nowadays it isn’t enough to
have links to your blogs, videos and social sites on your homepage. Now you are actually expected to feed them regularly.
In a blog entitled “What HummingbirdMeans for Small Business SEO,” searchenginewatch.com posted:
“Websites can't grow their
entrance pages without introducing new content regularly. While hard to believe,
there are many webmasters who don't update their websites, have no blog, and refuse
any assistance. While introducing new pages
of helpful, high-quality content is a great start, Webmasters and small business owners need
to be very creative to be noticed.
·
Utilize staff to promote in social media.”
Worst of all for many website
owners was the fact that Hummingbird was launched as a kind of sneak attack, with
Google dropping the bomb without warning which had the effect of taking many website owners by surprise.
Newswire.net reported that,
“In
the past, Google’s Panda and Penguin updates have struck fear in the hearts of SEOs
as they watched their clients’ rankings plummet. While Panda and Penguin affected
1% or 2% and still caused panic, this new update is reported to affect the majority
of search results and no one noticed until the announcement was made a month later. The last Google update that replaced this much
of the search engine was in 2010 with the ‘Caffeine’ update. Caffeine introduced
the ‘live search’ and keyword suggestion tools, and many people seem to have forgotten
the huge emphasis that it placed on social signals. This new update is possibly
even more dramatic since it appears Google now understands the intentions of the
words carried in these social signals.” http://www.newswire.net/newsroom/pr/00077509-google-hummingbird-favors-human-speech.html
What it boils down to is that
Google is only going to give high ranking to websites that provide a complete
multi-media
experience to visitors. This means the age
of “Set it and forget it” websites is at an end and that using trickery to garner
a high position is no longer going to be possible. It also means that what was traditionally considered
to be SEO-friendly will become as obsolete as many of the search engines that used
to rule cyberspace. (AltaVista, the titan
of the search engine world back in 1999 went dark for good in 2010 after seeing
its share of the market reduced to two tenths of one percent.)
So if you don’t want to wind
up relegated to the bone heap online, you need to create a corporate culture that
is designed to feed a world wide web that is hungry for content, before Google’s
next cute critter decides to take a bite out of your web presence.
Carl Weiss is president of W Squared Media
Group, a digital marketing agency that offers guaranteed
organic placement on a number of major search engines. He also owns Jacksonville
Video Production and co-hosts
the weekly online radio show Working the Web
to Win every Tuesday
at 4 pm Eastern.
It's amazing how such a little bird can make such a big mess.
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