by Mike Banks Valentine copyright © 2003

In a New York Times syndicated article titled 'Marketing is among the engines that drive the Web', reporter Bill Husted of the Atlanta Constitution Journal made the following statements.

"As the Web has become more important, a new type of marketing company has arisen. These companies make a living teaching web sites how manipulate search engines." "The idea is a simple one — "to fool the search engine and get higher on the list," said Naveen Donthu, a marketing professor at Georgia State University."

As founder of one of those "new type of marketing compan(ies)", I'd like to tell you that those foolish few who do "make a living teaching web sites how manipulate search engines" ... are unethical.

It is simply not advisable for those who want to stay in business. Those who use unethical techniques to "manipulate" the search engines will very quickly be *banned* from the search engines. Their clients, both past and present, could go down with them and no substantive SEO firm will use unethical techniques to risk the long term success of their company. In short, the industry is maturing and a standard of ethics has been established.

http://www.seopros.org/members/practices.htm
http://www.bruceclay.com/web_ethics.htm

See http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html where Google states plainly, "Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google's spam guidelines."

Those of us doing ethical SEO do report unethical firms and sites and most search engines provide reporting emails.

The following email addresses are obscured to spambot harvesters to human readable form only.

Google: spamreport (AT) google (DOT) com
AltaVista: spam-support (AT) altavista (DOT) com
Fast: spam (AT) fastsearch (DOT) com
Teoma: help (AT) teoma.com
Inktomi: spambuster (AT) inktomi (DOT) com

Most SEO firms work to bring ethics to the industry. It benefits businesses, SEO's and the search engines when our work honestly structures web sites in a way that has become known as "search engine friendly".

Without getting into tedious details (tedious for most, I find it fascinating) we simply emphasize TEXT and content, as well as web site structure, to help the search engine spiders understand what those sites are about. The most successful sites are full of good information and have lots of other related sites linking to them which also increases their ranking in the search results.

Husted also said,

"Some sites abuse the system, including phrases in the meta tags for services they do not offer or for information they do not have." and "Ordinary users can’t see these words. They’re hidden in the computer code used to create the Web pages."

These statements are simply not true. If a site has lots of good content about beekeeping, it doesn't matter what is "hidden in the computer code". As a matter of fact, most search engines no longer pay attention to most of those "meta tags — buried on each site" because abuse of those tags by unethical webmasters very quickly made meta tags meaningless. The search engines figured out that meta tags were being abused and decreased their importance in the search algorithms.

Husted's story may have been correct 5 years ago, but meta tags are mostly ignored by the top search engines now and most engines have ignored them for years. The abuse (called keyword stuffing) was practiced by unethical webmasters years ago, not by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms today.

Beekeepers just want to sell honey. If they hire an SEO firm to help their site rank well in the search engines, they are likely to sell more honey. There is no manipulation in that. If you want to read non-commercial information about beekeeping so as to avoid those sites selling things, simply look at the domain extension and go to the non-profit .edu and .org sites for your research and stay away from .com's.

Unfortunately, you'll miss some good information using that approach because ethical SEO firms labor to add relevant articles to our clients' commercial sites that lack them. Why? Because adding relevant content improves search engine ranking.

I'd also like to take the opportunity to point out a couple of things Husted is apparently not aware of.

He said, ". . . Yahoo (or in almost any other search engine)" Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. Husted continues . . . "Computer programs, not humans, do the majority of the work when it comes to creating search engine rankings."

While this is TRUE at crawler-based search engines like Google, it is FALSE when referring to Yahoo and Open Directory Project Directory results. Directories determine where a site belongs in their index by using a HUMAN reviewer. You'll note that on the results page, there are tabs across the top of the page saying, from left to right, " Web - Directory - News - Yellow Pages - Images."

If you then click on the "Directory" tab, you are now seeing results from the Yahoo Directory and ONLY from Yahoo Directory. Those "Directory" results may not show up in Google or any other search engine at all, but ONLY at Yahoo, where they paid to be listed.

"For starters, almost all commercial sites pay the search engine folks just to get listed. At Yahoo, for instance, commercial sites pay $299 a year."

Not true. Once again, Yahoo is a directory. Google and AllTheWeb.com, (two of the largest and most trusted crawler-based engines) have free submissions and their computers have "spiders" that will crawl the web and find most information without even submitting those sites.

Each of the major search engines have partnerships with most other large portals to provide search results to them. So those beekeepers can get listed in Yahoo search results simply by being listed in Google while never paying anyone a dime to be listed.

Further the largest of directories online is the Open Directory Project. Their directory is powered by HUMAN reviewers and they provide search results to hundreds of other web sites and portals with no charge either to the included sites or to the hundreds of sites that use their index! You can see that for yourself at the following URL:

http://dmoz.org/help/geninfo.html

"The ODP powers core directory services for some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google, Lycos, DirectHit, and HotBot, and hundreds of others. The ODP is 100% free. There is no cost to submit a site or to use our data."

There are programs at search engines called "paid inclusion" where site owners can pay to be INCLUDED in those search engines, but it has absolutely NO effect on their RANKING. It simply speeds up the six to eight week process of getting the engines to "crawl" the site with their "spiders".

This gets a site included in the index in as little as a week, but they may still show up near the bottom of thousands of results and still may never be seen when you search for the topic of that site using keywords at that search engines they have paid to be "included" in.

The final type of paid search positioning is done via what are called "pay-per-click" engines where site owners can bid (starting at about a dime per search phrase) on search phrases likely to bring visitors to their web site when searches are done at search engines that partner with those pay-per-click services.

The top pay-per-click sites, such as Overture.com have strict editorial guidelines that REQUIRE relevant content at the URL assigned to the search phrase of the bidding site owner. If the site owner bids more than all other bidders for a particular search phrase AND they have passed those editorial guidelines, their results will appear as one of those "sponsor matches" you mentioned at major portals, including Yahoo. No fooling anyone here either.

If sites do what is called "keyword phrase stuffing" by "including phrases in the meta tags for services they do not offer or for information they do not have." They are extremely likely to be either scam sites seeking to fleece the unsuspecting surfer in some identity theft scam or they intend to attract unknowing surfers to unsavory sites selling dubious physical enhancement pills, fountain of youth powders or dieting liquids.

You needn't worry that they will use the term "Beekeeping" to get you to those scam sites, so you can feel comfortable that your searches will still turn up sites about Beekeeping and not some site you hadn't intended to find. Keep your searches focused on beekeeping and be concise, you'll get great search engine results.

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing firms are working to make your search results more relevant. If we were to be hired by non-profit sites you seem to prefer, then we would happily help their site rank well for non-profit purposes. But, truth be known, most non-profit sites don't need help since those sites are usually full of great relevant text, have lots of links from other highly relevant, text based sites that are likely to be well ranked, which in turn helps to increase link popularity, and therefore improves the ranking of that original site.

Here's an example of exactly that scenario non-profit sites outrank commercial ones.

If you go to Google and search the phrase "Los Angeles Attorney", you'll find that the number one position is held by http://da.co.la.ca.us the LA District Attorney's Office web site. Number 2 position is held by the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office. This is not unusual for any search term that could apply to a government web site, as they often properly structure their pages, avoid using stupid techniques like keyword stuffing and provide tons of useful TEXT based content.

This is also due to the link popularity of the LA DA site with 954 links pointing to them, followed by proper page architecture of using Los Angeles Attorney in the most important places on the pages. Then finally, many pages of useful, text-filled content that is relevant to the search phrase.

No need to fear getting PAID results that are not labeled as 'Sponsor' and no need to worry that you are going to find sites in your searches that don't apply to beekeeping if that is what you searched for, no matter what is "hidden in the computer code."

As you can see, this information is complex and changes often as search engines merge, policies change and partnerships with portals change. This is the reason business web sites contract with SEO firms to gain and maintain top search rankings for those companies who don't have employees in-house with this specialized knowledge and the ability to devote time and resources to studying the continually evolving variables.