Devit!

We seem to find this though process to those who are just realizing how influential Google and other search engines can be to their business. “The higher we rank in Google the more hits we will get meaning more sales.” And then, “How can we rank higher in Google?”. After giving a brief insight into how a search engine works, through algorithms, we come to the final question. “Is there a software package than will optimize my site for the search engines to get me a higher ranking?”

The answer of course is a big NO. To answer why we have to delve a little deeper into how a search engine works. Search engines use specific algorithms (mathematical formulas basically) to determine which sites rank higher than others. Keyword frequency and incoming links are examples of criteria that might have an impact on ranking.

With this in mind think of the manipulating power you would have if you could reverse engineer those algorithms. In fact that is what many found they could do in the early days of search engines. But this very fact completely undermines the usefulness of a search engine. Instead of getting results that are most relevant, you are getting search results of the sites who had reverse engineered the search engine and manipulated their content to show up first. This is where you had sites with white text on a white background just to rank higher (just to make it clear, white text on white background will get you blacklisted as an SEO spammer so please don’t do it!).

In fact I believe that the downfall of many of the biggest search engines of that era was because of this very fact. Their users were not able to find what they were looking for because the results were so manipulated.

And now we come to the crux of a successful search engine - absolutely no one can know the algorithm being used to find search results. It is rumored that even at Google, their is no one person who really knows the full extent of how their search algorithm works.

Therefore if someone is advertising a program that can rank your site higher on Google, don’t buy it. If someone guarantees that they can rank your site #1, don’t believe them. All that can be done is a best guess. For advice and help when looking into SEO, find someone with experience. Only after working with many different sites can you even begin to have an idea of what affects search engine ranking.

Here’s a great article on just this from Highrankings.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 9:58 am and is filed under Devit!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.