The Problem With Search Engines
Author: Richard Lowe, Jr
http://webmaster-free.co.uk/articles/problems.php


If you read many of the articles about web site promotion, you will most definitely come away with the understanding that search engines are the hot ticket. In fact, there are quite a few authors who claim they are virtually the only viable advertising method available. I've heard figures ranging from 50% to 90% of traffic comes from search engines, with literally everything else being far less effective.

Hog wash.

Search engines are merely the first method you should use when you are promoting your site. They are easy and straightforward (at first glance) and you obviously need to use them to your fullest advantage.

However, there are some issues with the use of search engines as a promotional tool.

Rule #1: Webmasters are not the customers of the search engines - Webmasters are their indirect commodities. Search engines survive off of advertisements. The advertisers who purchase ads are the customers, and the visitors to the search engine web pages are the commodity that the search engines are selling. Webmasters are further removed, in that their products (web sites) are used to attract this commodity (visitors to search engines) to the web pages.

Corollary #1a: Webmasters are the least important part of the equation.

Corollary #1b: Advertisers are the most important part of the equation.

Don't believe this? Try sending a message to one of the big search engines complaining that your web site is not being indexed properly. See if you get a response at all. Now send a message to their sales department. Note that you get an almost immediate response.

Rule #2: Search engines are robots with specific rules - they do not make intelligent decisions, some programmer simply creates a rule base. The implication of this is search engines do not care (because they are not beings) about the beauty of your web site or the importance of your message. They simply follow their rules to determine how your site ranks and occasionally whether it is even added to the index at all.

Corollary #2a: Robots are stupid and can always be fooled because human beings will always be more intelligent than some piece of software.

Rule #3: Search engines are the most used method to find something on the internet - but they are among the least trusted. The implication here is that search engines do create traffic, but it is often not extremely desirable traffic.

Rule #4: While search engines appear to be easy to use as a promotion technique, mastering them and maintaining a good ranking can be a full time job. Since the ranking algorithms, spam filters and other routines used by search engines are kept very secret, it can be extremely difficult for a webmaster to actually get optimal traffic. In addition, these are frequently changed so that what worked today to get those thousand visitors may not work tomorrow.

Corollary #4a: You traffic will be uneven. Some weeks you may get thousands of visitors and others virtually none.

Corollary #4b: Search engines tend to randomly add and subtract links for no rational reason. Some days all 1,000 pages of your web site will be listed, and others you will drop out entirely.

Rule #5: The search engines are at war, literally, with those webmasters who are attempting to manipulate the rules to improve their traffic. This is often referred to as spamming the search engines and it comes in many forms. It could be as simple as submitting your site multiple times or as complex as creating mini websites which all direct visitors to a central website. Some sites have even included entire dictionaries on their pages in invisible letters to attempt to fool the search engine into listing the pages on as many keywords as possible.

Corollary #5a: If one of the major search engines decides that you are spamming, you will be blacklisted from that engine. Getting relisted can be a terribly difficult process which requires much work and many months of effort (see Rule #1).

So what does all of this really mean?

There are actually hundreds if not thousands of ways to promote your site on the internet. Many of these methods are far more effective and much more stable than search engines can even dream of being.

Viral marketing, for example, can build incredible traffic when used correctly. This is creating something that you give away which has your web site link added somewhere obvious. People send them to their friends and give them away, and those friends give them away also. With the right "freebie" you can generate literally millions of visitors almost overnight. (This is why e-cards are so popular).

Another very stable and useful promotional technique is link exchanges. These are time consuming to set up and maintain, but the benefits in return, qualified traffic are incredible. Link exchanges also tend to produce stable amounts of traffic rather than peaks and valleys. (A link exchange is exactly that - you and a fellow webmaster agree to link to each other's pages.)

You can get even more traffic by submitting your site to directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ (used by Netscape and other portals) and Looksmart. There are also many thousands of smaller, more specialized directories available which also build up a steady stream of more qualified visitors. The advantage of directories is they are usually edited by human beings, who can exercise a certain amount of intelligence over what they do.

There are many other promotional methods available. The main point is the smart webmaster takes advantage of all of them. I believe most will find, as I have, that once some of these other techniques build up a head of steam, the search engine traffic becomes so minor as to be inconsequential.