Can You Trick Google?

Fast food, One-Hour Photo, instant messages and cell phones.

Everyone wants everything the quickest and easiest way they can get it. So why should the internet be any different? We all want to build our site, publish it for all the world to see, and immediately achieve top ranking in all the search engines.

Well, that works about as well as the “diet pill”. There’s no easy fix for a big fanny and there’s no easy way to get a high ranking on the search engines. Both take work.


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But there are those among us who still believe that they can trick, fool and manipulate the search engines and achieve that high rank quickly and easily.

They might even succeed for a while, but eventually the webmasters that troll the internet looking for just such schemes will find them. When Google does “catch” a webmaster at such antics, they obliterate any PageRank (PR) they have achieved. Thus, said webmaster has to start all over.

But not only that, they also contribute to the search engines having to change their algorithm to prevent it from happening on a widespread scale. In retrospect this has been what makes it so hard to get a good ranking. As soon as you figure out what it takes, and start to optimize your site accordingly, they have to change the algorithm again.
As soon as people realized that whom is linking to whom figured into the ranking algorithms of search engines, especially Google, the trouble started.  They started thinking that an easy way to increase PR would be to link to each other regardless of content or relevance. The sheer number of links was their only concern.  This led to the birth of the “link farm” and began a downward spiral of internet ethics.



They began to realize that they could create many simple sites for one company and then link them all together to artificially inflate their link popularity.

Google has been doing everything it can to put a stop to this sort of manipulation. Many sites that were “optimized” in this fashion have seen their PageRank scores disappear.  As far as Google is concerned these sites’ backlinks are null and void. And we all know what happens to your ranking without incoming links, don’t we?

As a result honest webmasters are forced to find other ways to optimize their sites, while avoiding anything that could be construed as a link scheme. Now everyone seems to be confused on the safe linking criteria. And what if you do own legitimate multiple sites? Can you safely link them together without fear of penalty?

No one believes that Google, or any search engine, for that matter is looking for ways to keep sites from showing up in their directory. That would be professional suicide. But they are looking for ways to protect their users from unscrupulous webmasters and save them the time and trouble of having to scour through multiple irrelevant junk sites to find what they’re really looking for. The answer is really to build your website with your users in mind, not the search engines. This seems to be the general consensus of SEO experts and webmasters all over the web.