Google and Search Engine Optimizers

In 2002, I went to the annual 3 day Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose to see what the people from the engines were up to and to get a feel for what my Search Engine Optimizing peers were doing and how good they were.

There were a good number of respectable SEO/SEM firm owners and employees, there were those that bragged and blustered and intimated they had "fool-proof" "top-secret" methods and tricks, some people who just seemed to stock up on muffins at the buffet, and then there were the quiet guys who didn't socialize or talk to other people.

A little digging (well, if you can call "asking direct and rather inappropriate questions to people who would obviously rather be left alone" "digging") proved that couple of us had come to the fairly accurate conclusion that the quiet people were often one of two kinds of attendees.

In the first group were the porn and casino and finance power optimizers who aren't against using any means possible to get their sites highly ranked on search engines, the "Black-hat optimizers" or "Search Engine Spammers" looking for their fellow Black-hats to see if they had discovered a means of spamming that they hadn't found themselves yet, or looking for clueless site owners to pander to and then get blacklisted from the engines.
(Hee hee!)

The second group (and a very respectable one indeed) were site owners of large, very profitable e-commerce sites who had a small team of employees that did all their technical and optimization work in-house so they didn't have to rely on outside firms' opinions and so they themselves would be on the "cutting-edge" of the S.E.O. / S.E.M. game.

These people kept a low profile mostly so they wouldn't have to spend the entire conference fending off the advances of hungry go-getting S.E.Oers who could smell the blood of a site owner with investors and would go into a feeding frenzy like hungry sharks, (or, well, at least like hungry geeks at a buffet offering free high quality muffins and Snapple) if they got a whiff of them.

2002 was also the year that Google started pushing their P.P.C. service "AdWords" (started in 2000?) hard (if I'm remembering correctly here) on a large scale to start to rival Overture (now Yahoo! Search Marketing).

AdWords, as you probably know, is a search engine advertising method offered by Google using the pay-per-click model.

You bid on keywords you think are relevant for the site you want to advertise and based on your bid, your text advertisement is shown in a certain position when a person does a search using the keyword you've bid on.

You are then charged the price of your bid for that position for that keyword each time a person clicks your ad (hence "Pay Per Click").

This is responsible for the bulk of Google's profits now. ($3 Billion annually is the figure I've been hearing)

The job of a Search Engine Optimizer is to get their site (the site they're responsible for) to rank in the top 10 or first page of search results.

Ideally, in the top 1 to 3 results so they can get the search engine traffic from the organic results (the non-paid, not p.p.c. result) and funnel that into their site.

In other words, to use the natural search engine results as an advertising / marketing tool for free.
(Well, it may not be free if a client's paying a firm to optimize their site for them, but they are not paying a pay-per-click cost on the resulting traffic unless they have chosen a firm with an "interesting" (read: "not interesting at all") fee scheme for their SEO partner)

At first glance, Search Engine Optimizers and Search Engines are "enemies".
The Optimizers want to get something for free from the Search Engines, and the Search Engines want people to pay to advertise on them.

This was why I thought it was amusing that Google was holding a "Google Dance" (linked only because I've clicked every damned picture to make sure I wasn't in them) on the last night of the conference.

We, the conference attendees, were boarded on to chartered busses and driven to the lovely and ergonomic-looking "Googleplex" in Mountain View.

It was a bizarre feeling once we, a large group of people who try to get advertising for "free" off of Google, arrived at our Mecca.

There were a bevy of "Google Girls" (check out the babes in red tee-shirts in the Google Dance photos) greeting us and schmoozing and, I suppose, offering us a contact at Google for our AdWords needs.

There were regular police in the driveway as we pulled up (because you know how rowdy IT geeks tend to be)and armed guards outside some of the buildings.

(One of whom sent me away from a building that looked from the outside a lot like a server room, as I was trying hard to peek in the windows...
Not my most dignified memory of that night, but, hey, can you really blame me here?)

Later in the evening there was a Techno D.J. and, well, "Google dancing".
(many of the tee-shirted ladies and men were mini-raving leading me to wonder if "X" was a big part of Google staff culture..)

There was a man roaming around like a king in the fog machine fog wearing a trench coat that looked a lot like The Man, Sergey Brin, himself.

(It was he, I heard, as a bunch of Internet geeks quieted down and whispered in reverent tones and gawked and pointed and made other such dignified gestures of respect for one of our "leaders". All that was missing was the "Shining of teh laser pointers" so often observed at such gatherings. ("Nerdus eventus" in Latin))

So why have I been thinking about this event that happened over 3 years ago lately?

This is why.

Google has recently added a lot to, and changed around this section substantially.

In the beginning and until not so long ago, the SEO information was mostly who not to hire to do your SEO for you.

Now, it's a whole lot more than that.

Sure, it's not a full laundry list of how to optimize for Google, and there really is quite a list, but it's information a new site owner might not otherwise think of immediately and should prove helpful in their struggle to get better rankings on Google, and turn them on to organic search engine optimization as well.

So I asked myself, what does Google gain by teaching people how to optimize their sites for Google when it should not want optimized sites but rather it should want people to buy their 3 billion dollar a year AdWords?

The answer, I think, is quite simple.

The fewer optimized sites there are, the easier it is to achieve and maintain high rankings on a search engine.
Every SEO knows this.
And if everyone has an optimized site for your keywords, it becomes harder and harder to do effective SEO.

On a still fair search engine like Google, regardless of who they are, there are always going to be sites in the first page of results.

When an honest Search Engine Optimization firm is first contacted by a client, they'll check out the client's keyword set and see if it's going to cost the client more to optimize organically or to just buy P.P.C. ads since many don't have the budgets required for both.

(Even though they absolutely should, but this is a different rant for a different day.)

When you see that the top 50 sites are highly competitive for the main keyword that will bring in the bulk of your traffic, you usually opt for P.P.C. keyword buying for the main keyword and optimize for the secondary keywords unless your client has a serious contender which includes a lot of different elements that many people bringing you an already built site usually just don't have.

By pushing and educating people about SEO, Google is helping to saturate their results with as many optimized sites as possible and ironically push more and more sites towards their AdWords.

I think this is brilliant.

And this is one of the reasons people like me still love Google so much better than the other engines.

See, rankings on the other engines can, to an extent that seems to be growing daily, be had for a price.

The richest site owner (or the spammiest, or the "dirtiest") gets the rankings.

On Google, it's still a pretty fair competition, but they're trying to level the playing field so they can make the money they want to off it.

And as long as Google maintains their "Corporation with integrity" policy, it'll be the engine most fun to, and most rewarding to, optimize for.

They do make sure we don't get lazy here though.

Here's a toast to Google, a company that makes me go "Hmmmmmmm" quite often, but that doesn't end up making me say "And WTF??" as well.