Search Engine Optimisation is big business in IT. It’s just a pity it’s become so intrusive.
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It used to be this simple
(Photo from SMBSEO.com)
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Can I have your attention please? I apologise in
advance, but I am about to abuse my position as a software tester. No,
I’m not going to sell confidential client information to Russian spies
or anything like that, but I am nonetheless going to misuse this blog to
further my personal interests outside of my job. All right. Are you
ready? Let’s do a countdown and get this over with. 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 …
Actually,
you needn’t click there if you don’t want to. I’m not too fussed either
way. For those who didn’t bother clicking, that was a link to my web
site on play writing, which is what I do in my alternate life. I don’t
care too much whether you view it – seriously, there can’t be that many
people with interests in both software testing and theatre in the
vicinity of Durham – but that’s not the purpose of the link. The purpose
of the link is for Google and other search engines to know it’s there.
Because the more links Google finds to your page, the higher it gets up
the page rankings.
It
used to be so much simpler. In the olden days, if you wanted some
builders in Woking, you looked until “Builders” in the Yellow Pages.
Builders and other businesses paid for advertising space, with more
money for a bigger advert, and unless you traded as Aaron A. Aardvark or
Zzacharias Z. Zzyzz, there wasn’t any real way of gaming the system.
This all changed when the internet came along. The early search engines
gave the top entry to whichever entry put the search term in the text
and keywords the most often. This was a reasonable idea – after all, if
you’re looking for a web page about Yorkshire, you probably don’t want a
food menu from a pub in Dorset that happens to include Yorkshire
puddings in its Sunday roast – but this inevitably resulted in every
builder in Woking entering keywords of BUILDERS BUILDERS BUILDERS
BUILDERS WOKING WOKING WOKING TRUSTWORTHY RELIABLE QUALITY etc. etc.
So when a couple of researchers at Stanford University came up with the idea of “PageRank”,
which instead considered how many websites link to yours (and how
prominent the linking pages are), Google became the overnight success we
all know about. But anyone hoping for an end to search engine wars can
be disappointed. I confess, I find chasing pageviews on this blog and my
own site addictive, but I have better things to do than put links on as
many sites as possible. If, however, you’re business dependent on web
visibility, there’s a lot more at stake. And this is why Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO) is such big business.
Now,
it wouldn’t be fair to portray SEO companies as the bogeymen. Plenty of
SEO techniques, such as placing appropriate links on other websites,
are considered perfectly legitimate. I have absolutely no problems with
my Google searches being made relevant to what I’m looking for. If I’m
looking for builders in Woking, I’m quite happy for SEO companies to
ensure that no-one I might be interested in gets overlooked. The problem
is that once market forces come into play, a “relevant web experience”
often means trying to bombard users with whatever gets money out of
them. As soon as Google started judging importance on links from other
sites, attention turned to these other sites – and the lengths some
sites went to was astonishing. Blogs and open wikis used to get plagued
with irrelevant links (with reasons for the link frequently no better
than “check out this cool site”). Many platforms, including Wordpress
and Wikipedia now use the “nofollow” tag to stop this practice paying off, but whether this actually deters link spammers is anyone’s guess.
The
lengths some sites go to is astonishing. There is a big business is
linkfarms: sites that serve no function other than trying to push up
another page’s Google place. Sites that get caught by Google are, in
effect, disqualified and put to the bottom of the list. One high-profile
casualty in 2006 was BMW.
Three years earlier, a company called SearchKing was rumbled and
penalised for blatantly gaming the system, who promptly resolved by suing Google.
They got nowhere, but it says something about how much some people
consider buying their Google rank as entitlement. Lately, Google
appears to have gone to war with WebPosition Gold
for sending automated queries to probe Google’s rankings (and, one
might suspect, find the loopholes). But the question remains: how much
of this practice goes undetected?
Then
there’s the practice of drawing people to your site who were looking
for something else. I got a surprising number of visitors to my blog entry about software patents
who were looking for pictures of the Montgolfier brothers. That was
purely by accident, but there is a growing suspicion this sort of thing is being
exploited on purpose. BMW was found to have redirected users to a site
with far fewer keywords that the user searched for. It was claimed by
Private Eye that journalists are encouraged to put popular search phrases into articles in order to increase web traffic, and therefore advertising revenue. There's no knowing where this will end.
Is
there a solution to this? I honestly don’t know. I’ve previously argued
you could solve the software patent problem by scrapping patents, but
you can’t exactly solve this problem by scrapping search engines. It’s
all very well telling Google to try harder, but they are already in a fight
to stay one step ahead of the link spammers. I’m almost tempted to
suggest a return to an internet version of the Yellow Pages, where
people looking for adverts can go to a web page where prominence is once
more governed by how much you pay for advertising cyberspace – but as
paid adverts are an even bigger pain in the backside, I can’t the public
buying into this idea.
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