Computerworld - Being at the top of a search engine results page can mean the difference between business success and failure. So, what would you do to ensure a listing there?
Absolutely anything?
If so, you could be walking into a minefield.
Search engine optimization (known as SEO) involves actions intended to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. In the past 15 years, SEO has evolved into a complex art, one that is now the foundation of many businesses.
The problem is that there are ways of trying to improve your standing that are considered legitimate by the search engine companies like Google, but there are also methods that can get you into trouble. Google (which receives 90% of the world's search engine traffic,
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Just ask $17 billion retailer J.C. Penney,
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"Our high [search engine result] rankings were pushed down," Darcie Brossart, Penney's vice president of communications in Plano, Texas, confirmed concerning the sanctions Google imposed. "We have terminated our relationship with our former natural SEO firm. We don't know how it happened. We did not authorize it,
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It's important to recognize if your SEO firm (or your in-house Web expert) is venturing too close to the edge of the black-hat cliff -- because if Google or other search engines find there is some hanky-panky happening,
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A good grounding in what the major search engines do and don't consider acceptable can help companies avoid these issues. What follows are some of the techniques that are considered legitimate -- and not so legitimate -- and how you can tell the difference.
But first,
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Google's secret sauce
The foundation of Google's trademarked site-ranking technique, called PageRank, is links, explains spokesman Jake Hubert. PageRank is based on the number of outside Web pages that link to a page,
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But while links remain a major consideration in PageRank ratings, Google's techniques have evolved since the search engine was launched in 1997. The company now ranks pages with an algorithm that has about 200 factors,
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Further details about the algorithm are not made public, Hubert says. A public version of an individual page's PageRank rating is displayed by Google Toolbar. However, those ratings sometimes need to be taken with a grain of salt,
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At Bing, a Microsoft spokesman would only say that the site uses upwards of a thousand signals when deciding search results ranking, and that the nature and weight of the signals are constantly being adjusted. Meanwhile,
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Because the algorithms remain a closely guarded secret,
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