Making Google look stupid
Both Shoemoney and Aaron Wall have published interesting posts over the weekend about why you shouldn’t make Google look stupid.
They discuss how sites with quality content can be penalised for employing aggressive (and effective) marketing techniques just because Google doesn’t want to see these sites ranking highly.
This is something I’ve always been very conscious about when looking at affiliate sites and even client sites sometimes. If you want your site to rank for something like “car insurance” you need to make sure that it is better than all the other top 10 results for the same search term. Sure, if you are a huge company you can get away with being just as good as the others but those of you with affiliate sites have to be far better than all the other sites otherwise Google isn’t going to let you rank for long, no matter how many links you have and how old your site is.
Sometimes its better to stay under the radar and not try to rank for the money terms until your site deserves to be there. Nothing will give you a penalty quicker than getting a thin affiliate site to the top of a search term like “mortgages”.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Excellent point.
What’s worse is when a site that steals content from Wikipedia and creative commons blogs reaches the top. I really wish Google would just put a friggin “Report Spam” link next to each result.
Well …
I have observed quite many other business sites which are targeting a very similar market and audience as I do in the past. I am always astonished how these websites have managed to get top results on the SERPs on Google.com within a very short period of time.
Especially when you have a look at the (poor) quality of inbound links. (The term fits very well on my opinion “Quantity is not quality”.)
Right now, I am also questioning “Google’s Golden Webmaster Guidelines & Rules”. Maybe Mr. Matt Cutts could explain to me these rules and suggestions once again in clear words since I have great difficulties at the moment to get the real point out of their “Golden Webmaster Rules”.
I have the slight impression that no matter how hard Webmasters are trying to do things right (in terms of SEO in an ethical sense), in the end, it is up to the Search Engine Master Google.com himself to decide IF, WHEN, and HOW MUCH money you are allowed to make on the web.
graphically & sincerely,
Marc Klein