BeeDeeDubbleU - 6:50 am on Apr 15, 2005 (gmt 0)

THE CASE FOR AN OOP

I tend to lean towards the OOP camp for no other reason than it is a logical and simple thing for Google to do. It also looks like that what is happening to a couple of my sites. Bear with me while I give you my tuppence worth on this.

Let's have a look at it from Google's perspective. They know that people (us) try to manipulate their results. They also know that we are aware of many of the main factors that are used by the algorithm to increase SERPs position, they even tell us about them. They know that we will use them on our websites so how would they combat this?

If it were me I would look for competitive or even common KWs in meta content, page titles, descriptions, H1 tags, bolded text, anchor text, etc. etc. If I saw these words there I think I could safely say that they did not appear in all of these places naturally and that KWs were being targeted. I would not penalise the site for this. I would merely disregard any weighting factor for these KWs on this site. Wouldn't this be an effective way of combating spammers? This is one of Google's declared missions.

It is very unlikely that KWs would appear naturally in all of these places. Let's say that we don't know about SEO. We trade on the name "J. Blooggs" and we sell "enamel dobbers". Would we buy the domain name enamel-dobbers.com? I doubt it, we would be much more likely to go for jblooggs.com. We could title the home page "Enamel Dobbers direct to you from Joe Blooggs". In the page description we say something along the lines of, "We provide all kinds of Enamel Dobbers Worldwide". The page header (H1) may also be something like, "Enamel Dobbers from J. Blooggs". We may have anchor text somewhere on the page that links to internal pages with different ranges of enamel dobbers but apart from a few references in the page text content that would be about it. Google comes along and thinks ... hmmmm ... this site must have something to do with enamel dobbers so I'll rank it accordingly.

OTOH if we were specifically targeting the KWs "enamel dobbers" we would have all of the above. We could have the domain name enamel-dobbers.com. We may also have lots of anchor text that uses the KWs. We would have an unnaturally high KW density in the text. We would have it bolded, linked, H1'd, H2'd, H3'd. It would be at the start of every paragraph, every header, every description, etc. etc. Google comes along and thinks ... hmmm ... this site is definitely about enamel dobbers but the webmaster has SEO'd it to death. I think I'll just disregard it for these KWs, he/she is probably trying to spam me.

We all know that the Algo is clever enough to (mostly) rank things fairly accurately. It does this by looking at all of the factors mentioned above so wouldn't it be a simple progression to analyse these and apply an OOP where required?

There will be other over riding factors such as when the site is a "major player" with PR7, long established, etc. This is probably why the site in your example gets away with it. There is also a magic recipe for the use of these factors that lets some sites rank highly. The ingredients will be a combination of these factors with some of them omitted but I don't know which, (I just wish that I did!)

( ... now quickly ducks behind the barricade.)