For years, Internet Marketing has been to a very large part, a battle between the search engines and people trying to trick them into ranking their sites high (“Black Hat” SEO’s). “White Hat” SEO means working WITH Google and the other search engines, how they think and what they are trying to do. It means delivering great content on-subject because that is what the search engines are trying to help people find.
Sure, it also means understanding the cues that Google uses to identify what your site and page are about, and how important they are. But that is something you do in addition to – not instead of – providing the visitor experience people are seeking.
Of course it is easier if you can just do some simple gimmick that shoots you to the top of the rankings.
“Black Hat” techniques have evolved over the years. In the early days it meant repeating keywords lots of times. Then there were so-called “link farms” where people would build pages with zillions of links to each other. Invisible text. The tricks go on and on.
Every time someone thought of a way to beat Google, Google responded by improving their algorithms.
But it has been a battle, a back-and-forth.
Until now.
This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not greatly so. Thanks to Caffeine, the Black Hats have lost the war.
It is no longer possible to invent a trick that Google can’t respond to even before it becomes well known.
Google doesn’t even have to really work at this. They are continuing to work at improving the search experience. Rolling out significant changes two or three in a week.
Searches are getting so localized and personalized, some people are saying “search engine ranking” doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Of course that IS an exaggeration. But it points out the only real test of SEO: Not what a rankings report says, but how much quality traffic is actually delivered to a site. And, more than that: The subject is Internet Marketing. It is really about the volume of leads or sales generated through a website, and how much that costs.
Who cares how much traffic comes to a site if it is all wasted by the site itself?
So what does it all mean?
It means the Good Guys win. The guys in White Hats.