Search engines are software which means they have bugs and they are not always perfect. In fact, in the case of Google – I honestly feel that we think the search engine is smarter than it really is. We’ll get to that in second.
At Spark Internet Marketing we take great care and pride in developing search engine optimization strategies that are above the board and which we feel will weather the storms of algo changes such as the one currently beating on the shores of paid link directory sites.
So, what’s wrong with Google right now? Yesterday, Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal posted a discovery he made of an alarming scenario of Google not properly filtering out sites using “Hit Counter link spam”. To sum up the scenario a company was getting links to their site for the phrase “Pay Day Loans” from completely unrelated websites and ranking in the top spots on Google for the term. Deeper investigation showed that the sites using the Hit Counter were completely unaware of the practice and began removing the hit counter from their sites.
Lesson to be learned – focus on methods of generating natural links to your site in a consistent manner over time. Long lasting Search Engine Optimization is more about developing a strong marketing plan and providing good content / information that people want to link to than it is about developing quick and dirty links over night.
