Marketing Bones

It’s a given today that search spam is a growing problem for Google. According to the CEO of Blekko (the different search engine),  Google’s recent algorithm changes won’t make much of a difference as he rightly states that  Google didn’t manually remove any sites from its index as the search spammers still show up in the search results, though in different places.

Business Insider recently interviewed him. Here’s that interview in its entirety. It makes for very interesting reading. » Read more: How Blekko might best Google soon

Continuing on from Part I of this article…

PageRank was a good signal, where the importance of a page relative to the rest of the Web helped determine relevance. Other signals were the title on a page, anchor text (the words that make up the actual hyperlink connecting one page to another), freshness of pages, location, content relevance, meta content etc. Today, Google uses more than 200 signals to help rank its results.

Over the past couple of years, folks have started complaining about unethical business practices in the search marketing industry.  Snake oil SEOs guaranteeing first page rankings, independent authorities selling rankings for profit etc. etc. » Read more: Has Google’s Search Algorithm become like the Tax Code? Part II

Google changes its algorithm all the time. It’s almost like the tax code. The original tax code was simple and easy to understand. Over time, however, we humans, tried to circumvent it using tricky naming conventions and financial maneuvers. The IRS recognized that and made a new set of rules to overcome that. The human race found more ways to reclassify or rename things to avoid taxation. The IRS added more clauses and rules to overcome that.

Over the years, this cycle continued till the point today where the tax code is now a set of complex and complicated rules which require translators (CPAs) to help people understand them.

With the consistent changes that Google makes all the time to its algorithm, is Google going the way of the tax code? » Read more: Has Google’s Search Algorithm become like the Tax Code? Part I