Google's Search Engine Optimization: Is the SEO game rigged?

Although I'm a freelance website designer,  I don't want to use this post to talk about the inner workings of what it takes to make a website successful. I don’t want to turn this post into another Internet marketing blog. Ironically most of Google's income is from telling others how to make money on the Internet. It’s a game, and regardless of what Google thinks of my website, I want to add real value to my readers.

It seems these days I spend more time optimizing a website than designing the website itself. I follow all the tips, tricks, and rules to get Google to recognize my painstaking efforts and sometimes that's still not enough. I feel I sometimes have to "dumb down" my content in order to get Google to recognize it. Is this the way it's supposed to be? Is this really progress?

In researching what makes up a search engine, I found that the problem with Google search is that it's mostly computer algorithm driven. They believe their search engine results should be primarily driven by an automated system. Google’s bots scan your content to determine relevancy, and how your content should be weighted against other websites. It’s a very complex process that I won’t go into detail here.

Unfortunately with most computer scientists, most feel a computer algorithm can replace the human element. When in fact a human should always be in the loop in some fashion.

Their income is from ad banners, not organic search results (Organic search results describe a search that returns results by indexing pages based on content and keyword relevancy. This is in contrast to listings ranked based on who paid the most money to appear at the top). Not that I can blame them for this, but once you realize organic search seems to be mostly an annoyance to them, it makes perfect sense. In reality they don’t care they just knocked your site out of search results from a decent ranking previously.

I played by what I thought were their rules, and still got punished for some unknown reason. Google decides with their automated algorithms that someone now has spammy non unique content. I have no problem playing by Google’s rules, but I don’t have the slightest clue what that is. If Google made the rules clear, perhaps black hat SEO will decease in the process. What is Black Hat SEO you ask?

Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. These black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• breaks search engine rules and regulations
• creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
• unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

A lot of what is known as black hat SEO actually used to be legit, but some folks went a bit overboard and now these techniques are frowned upon by the general SEO community at large. These black hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings, but if you are discovered utilizing these spammy techniques on your Web site, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO basically is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a Web site that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that.

I do plan on to keep updating my websites, fighting the good fight against Google’s stupidity, and relying less on Google for visitors. For any online business it makes sense to do this because at anytime you could be deemed a spammer in the eyes of Google. Your business can literally end overnight. I’ve unfortunately seen too many online business rely on search engine traffic, only to get completely wiped out from an update.