Search Engines still a Frontier?

 

Flurry of “activities” related to search engines and website optimization drew me  to the digital marketing world.  The current hot flavor (actually has always been) is digging out the factors that Google (supposedly) takes into account in order to rank websites higher in the SERP.  

Mining activities range from the task of compiling 200 factors based on what SEO pundits have been talking about  (more importantly what is coming from Google’s Spam Master +Matt Cutts) to running yearlong correlation experiments on a large scale (I wrote about deconstructing the ranking factors last week in my other blog post) . 

Then there is an elegant “Periodic Table” compiled by +Danny Sullivan (from Search Engine Land) that groups and lays out these factors. 

                                                   (See the bigger version at SearchEngine Land)

The idea of second guessing Google is not very attractive (and may not be very productive as well).  It is obvious from the constant series of algo updates from the search giant, that it  is  maintains the integrity of the Page Rank  jealously, and is thwarting all attempts to outfox its search results.

There is one aspect that deserves some thought though. Google has always been consistent in its advice that the website owners should stick to creating quality content that is useful to users, unique and engaging. The attempts cited above should be better aimed at finding factors (and parameters) that help the website content and usability measure up against that goal. 

It may be more useful to gauge the visitor's view of your website than to focus on outsmarting searchbot's clinical perspective.

Playing with just mechanics results in a constantly moving goalpost.