by Alan Rabinowitz
Recent newsletters showing people unhappy with Google SERPs, forums and colleges trying to analyze Google’s PageRank, tools that calculate Googles PageRank, theories on Google algorithms, theories on ranking strategies, anything good or bad about Google seems “Good for Google.”
The way I see it is that it’s all top notch marketing. Google likes any publicity (like this post) free media, free industry buzz, good or bad does not seem to matter. The more, the merrier. If you talk about us and we grow, talk bad about us ad we grow, sue us and we grow, philosophize about us, and we grow. Anything Google grows Google.
Start a computer and OS, drop the product from the public eye, and we grow. Google it and we grow. Let’s face it this company is growing and growing extremely fast.
This would explain why Google has never fixed its archaic handling of 302 redirects (de-ranks entire sites or puts the ownership on the linking site), and its canonical issues (it cannot tell the difference between www.domain.com, domain.com, domain.com/index.html and the https version of the domain – and will auto-penalize the site), and the fact that it doesn’t properly handle duplicate content and finds the wrong owner, and the MFA pages that are found in every search. And the fact that it spiders everything then devalues much of it to try and compete in the “Size Wars.”
So why not fix these? Well if people start forums that talk about elements of Google that they like or dislike, then they get the buzz. There are forums, websites, and even networks of sites whose sole purpose is to talk about Google and Google News
The search industry is at is the highest peak ever, and projections are expected to be far greater every year, so anyway we can market an aspect, product, or a service of the most popular search engine and make it a hit, the more we win again.
In relationship to Search Engine Optimization, this makes our SEO efforts more marketing oriented daily. If we sit back with old approaches used in the late 90’s, then we are not making the right efforts to optimize a website. Marketing is playing more of a role in link popularity than every before and all those specials companies love to promote, now need to be better to allow for viral SEO strategies.
What makes Google popular? It’s viral and has been viral for a long time. It’s all the little components that it uses that keep the popularity going; PageRank, Toolbars, Rankings, Google Flaws, Adsense and many other trendy, fun things like “Google It” which try to make it an experience.
If we use these methodologies on the sites we SEO, then we are putting marketing power to work in SEO and making it more powerful.