Webpit.com - A Coder's Blog

The year was 1997. I was contracted by Tabnet, Inc. to write a piece of software that would automatically submit sites to thousands of “link farms” and search engines. The software worked so well, or I so impressed the CEO that I was offered a job. We used the software to sell a service to our web hosting customers. A year or so passed by and search engines began changing their algorithms. Link farms were no longer a viable means of getting your site noticed. Then the king was born. Google enters the arena with its plain-faced home page. It was all the rave back then. Oh, how I can remember the days. The days of yesteryear, when cloaked pages worked. When Search Engine Optimization was a sure thing.

They say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Here it is, 2008, and if Google is King, then “Social Bookmarking” sites like Digg, Deli.cio.us, etc are most certainly his most trusted advisors. Last year, I didn’t put much stock into these sites. I didn’t understand them, and didn’t care to. I wasn’t blogging at the time and I only really knew of Digg because our web designer insisted on having a button that linked our pages to Digg.com. Since then, and especially since starting this blog, I have come to realize, things really haven’t changed. The names have changed. Instead of Link Farm, we call it “Social Bookmarking.” The method’s haven’t changed either.

In all its prowess as a search engine, Google trusts human submitted content more than its own algorithms. Case in point: Just a few short years ago, you would have had to be superman to get your site on the first page of search results for your desired keywords. Now today, its really not that hard. Is it too easy? I mean, if I can do it, certainly those silk suite wearing SEO gurus with the Porsche’s paid for by SEO-hungry companies should have no difficulty achieving the same thing right?

Rumor has it that Google despises Search Engine Optimization. Maybe they call it cheating, who knows. But to be honest, those who call themselves SEOs have their own greed to blame. In the never ending quest to be first on the list, companies resort to hiring SEOs to implement sketchy tactics and fooling both the search engine and the internet user at large into clicking links to what seemed like legitimate content, only to be led down an unrelated path.

I’m still unclear as to why Google trusts Social Bookmarking (cough, linkfarms, cough) now when just a couple of years ago, heck maybe not even that long ago, they openly stated they would avoid them. Volumes of blog articles attest to the suspicion that listing your site in link farms was the equivalent of search engine suicide. So it seems we have gone full circle and it took only about 10 years to do it. So what’s next, we start cloaking pages again? Are we just in a cyclic paradox that we are incapable of escaping? Is this really Web 2.0? What would Jean Luc Picard do?