Part 1: Dirty tricks, search engine placement and rankings

What gets you banned from a search engine?
Our basic policy for content is we want to make sure that the priority that people place on a page is the same as what a search engine sees. Any attempt to deceive what it sees are things we would consider banning.

The most egregious thing to do is cloaking, where the website figures out that it's Google and gives back totally separate content than it does if a regular user was coming to the site. Sometimes it's done to deceive, sometimes it might be done because the website owner really thinks they are helping us by optimizing content, but in any case, it goes against our ideal of us seeing the same thing a search engine sees.

Also you'll see techniques where people put things in the same text color as the background color or put text really small. Or try to put things in places that aren't rendered, like in metatags or something like that.

How much time do you think people spend trying to thwart search engines?
Well, I know there's a small subset of the website population who spend a lot of time on it. They have sites that only deal with search engine placement and most of the stuff they talk about are illegitimate ways to fool search engines.

And how does Google thwart those efforts?
Well, I'm not going to explicitly say how we do it, but I can tell you our emphasis is on making our algorithms as fail-safe as possible so we don't even deal with the issue at all. For instance, our page rank algorithm, the underpinning of what we do, is designed in such a way that it would be very difficult to use some of the spam techniques that work on the other search engines.

Because of your use of scalibility, and link importance?
Yes, the way our page ranking works is it gives you a guide to the importance of a page. So it's not enough to create a page with a bunch of tricks on it. Even if they did manage to trick our search engine, they would have to convince us that their page is more than just very relevant to a query (which they could do with some of these spam techniques like cloaking and so forth).

They would also have to convince us of the page's importance; that's a lot harder to do because it involves other websites.

What about the folks who don't have a budget to pay valid search engine placement companies?
I'll tell you what we tell people to do and these are all free. The first thing is to design a website that accurately reflects your content, put text on your website that accurately represents what service you are providing.

The other is to make sure that the people that should be linked to you are linked to you. This involves not just the direct things you think of like Yahoo. For instance if you're running a store that sells Charles Schultz memorabilia, you want to make sure that all the Peanuts fan sites on the Web know about you.

You don't need to pay them to have a link to you, you just write them and say, "I'm offering a service that would be of interest to your readers, perhaps you would want to put a link on your website to mine."

If it's a useful service, they'll gladly put it up. And that's what we want to have happen, to kind of have peers judging how useful your web page is.

Without ticking off all the paid search engine placement folks, what it really comes down to is if you have a site that other people are interested in, then that's really the key?
Yes, once you have that it's not difficult to get good search engine placement. But for a lot of people they may not have such a site.

But they think they do?
Well, they may think that or they may feel it might become such a thing if more people started visiting it, and what they need is good search engine placement to start building the kind of community they need. But for us that's like putting the cart before the horse.

What would you say to folks who say search engine placement is a Catch-22?
We don't believe it's a Catch-22, we believe that the place to get started is not through a search engine, but through the community around which you're trying to build your page.

So other websites about a similar subject, news groups, or chat rooms where other people hang out and talk about the same kinds of things your page is about. You have kind of a grassroots effort in saying I have a page here, or I'm trying to build a product, community or service that I think your users would find interesting.

We think that's the place that's appropriate to get started. Once you've got that, the search engine placements will follow.

But if you try to say, I'm going to start from the search engine, that makes it very difficult for us because we really don't know whether it's a good result or not because there's not really a track record with that page or site.

Continued...