Another Reason To Spread Your SEO Across All Search Engines

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 22 of July , 2008 at 6:52 am

The search engines aggravate us a little from time to time; different search engines at different times for different reasons. However the one point it all proves is that your search engine optimization strategies need to target all search engines.

A member (trillianjedi) wrote a post reporting the state of his site. It had a PR5 and ranked at number one - even though the site had been dead for four months. Yes you read right - after four months of dead pages, the site still ranked at number one. Top search engine optimization program obviously. However the statement that tweaked my interest was:

Anyone landing on my site in the last 4 months would be greatly disappointed. In Google as much as me.

And they are right on both points - their reputation would not be enhanced and if they ever get the site back on line may struggle to get those visitors back. Google’s own reputation - well do they really care?

A second member reported their site as dead for 12 months and still ranking number one. I can understand a dead site still ranking for a period of time. However if the spiders are registering site problems over a period of time you would think the algorithms would drop those pages from the SERP’s until they were successfully spidered again.

There are two other issues to this problem. The first is a growing distrust of search results which could eventually impact on the activities of SEO consultants. If Google starts to lose credibility it may spread across all search engines. Users will start to use alternative methods to find the information they require.

The second issue that affects SEO experts is the trading of high ranking domain names. The domains are traded and not the content. This means you can effectively start your business with a well ranked site; this is fine if the domain name has been optimized and is used as a search term. Pages that are missing however, will require redirecting to a landing page, this may not meet with approval from the user.

Google is the one search engine that constantly talks about providing what the users want. We are technically supposed to create sites and content for the user - not the search engine. While spouting this philosophy, they themselves are serving up blank pages in the search results???

Category: Search Engines

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