by Matt Jackson, 11/21/2006
An Introduction To Google (For Those That Might Need It)
Google is the behemoth of search engines, the plateau we aspire to, and the chagrin of many a Webmaster and marketer. If they love your website, you will in turn grow to love the masses of traffic they send your way. In contrast, if they deem your site to be of little or no value then you'll struggle to fill the aching void in your Internet marketing. OK, so that might be a little over the top but to the battle hardened SEO a lot of it will probably ring true and they are certainly the biggest and most popular of the current search engines.
The Torrid Tale Of The Ever Changing Google Algorithm
Optimizing any site to promote it within Google search engine results pages can prove to be an ongoing saga. After countless months of optimizing, tweaking, linking, and improving you might be lucky enough to find your site listed at the top of the results page. If you do then we all hail you and you have the unarguable right to give yourself a firm pat on the back. Problems can arise, though, when Google perform another of their seemingly uncountable algorithm updates. Boom, your site suddenly drops from top spot to page 53 of the results. After a week of crying, shouting, and screaming the results begin to settle and your site once again finds itself heading towards the dizzy heights of page one.
Again, this is a slight over-exaggeration in most cases. Google do update their algorithms because they attempt to prevent the unethical few that we have all come to know and love as black hat SEOs from gaining that coveted top spot. In fairness to Google, this can't be an easy battle. They make a change, the black hat SEOs change their methods to match. Google again make some changes in a bid to counteract these new methods and, what do you know, the black hat SEOs pop up again with some new, equally cunning ploy to steal the top positions from the rest of us Google abiding promoters. And so, the algorithms change once again.
An Introduction To Our Hero - The Inbound Link
However, since time immemorial Google has loved the inbound link in an almost incestuous fashion. A quick browse through most result pages will throw up results that you might find to be a freak or just completely wrong. Those sites contain little or no mention of the keyword, or search phrase, in question and yet they're appearing above your impeccably optimized page. Looking beyond the search results and toward a link popularity tool you will inevitably find that the site in question has an excellent link profile.