You can fool some of the people some of the time, buut you can’t fool Google

Almost daily, I see a report about a company or individuals who is trying to fool Google through SEO. When are they going to learn that you just can’t fool Google? Why would you even want to try it, with when you risk being banned from the biggest search engine in the world? Many people seem to try just because they wonder if it could ever be done. As a general rule of thumb: it can’t!

There are some instances in which people think that they have tricked google. They believe that something that they have done has rocketed their site to the top of Google’s listings and they truly believe that they have managed to “stick it to the man.” Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google’s criteria better than other sites in their category without even realizing it.

Once in a while someone will actually come up with a way to fool Google. They will be enjoy a nice high spot on google’s listings for maybe even several months, but then the end comes for these proud sites. As soon as Google notices that it has been cheated, these sites are removed from the index; sometimes permanently.

The fact is that these people don’t understand the power that Google has. Anyone with a real interest in making money from the web should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the web. They don’t have to let you back in, and they don’t have to give you any right to respond – you’re entirely at their mercy. You don’t want to get in their bad books.

Aside from the fact that Google will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool Google. If you fool Google, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will chase the customer away for good.

If you want your website to be found in categories that don’t apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Google listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Google’s eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.

Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google’s PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other – like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google’s search results through the sheer quantity of links to them –this is known as Googlebombing. But it doesn’t always work.

Google knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine for the rest of us. After all, if link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then we’ll all start seeing worse search results. That’s why Google constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Google implements is mysterious and ever changing. This is the primary reason that Google cannot be fooled. 

It has been found recently that Google is now sending out ‘cloak bots’, disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are ‘cloaking’ – serving a different page to search engines than what visitors see. These ‘cloak bots’ are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Google’s results.

Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with what’s going on.

As you may already know, Google publishes a list of guidelines suggesting legitimate ways to improve a site’s ranking, by making it more accessible and better. One of the tips is to make pages for users and not for search engines. You’d do well to listen to their advice.