From: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com [mailto:fairfieldl...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Richard M Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 4:45 AM To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Question for Rick Archer
It may not be widely publicised - but behind the scenes Google has been waging a vicious and bloody war against "Black Hat SEO". This term refers to those very clever and inventive Search Engine Optimizer experts who are forever trying to trick Google so as to get their sites to appear high in the "organic" listings. (Rick of course is "White hat SEO"!). They are to search engines what spammers are to email. If it's indeed true that Google are planning to plug the weaknesses in the algorithm with human review, then this suggests that Google could be raising the white flag and giving in, overwhelmed by the bad guys. A great shame. (But then the evidence for this in the article seems a bit weak?) My understanding is that Google's very smart and well-paid Ph.D.'s are always doing searches, seeing what comes up, and then tweaking the algorithm if those results don't effectively fulfill the search queries. But there are so many web sites and so many search terms that they can't possibly manually manipulate a significant percentage of search results. Of course, if they can fairly block a black hat technique, that may sweep many sites off the SERPS (search engine results pages) in one fell swoop. And they have done this many times over the years. That's why it's good to stick with white hat techniques. Go for long-term results, unless you're working with a throw-away domain.
