The War between the SEM and the Search Engine

A figurative war is going on right now ! It's a war between the cavalier SEM's who fight for site awarness and the Giant Search Engines. It has been a long ongoing saga that unlike star wars see's no end!

The relationship between the Search Engine and the SEM are co dependant on each other for existence. On one side, you have the SEO professional, whose main goal is to use all SEM techniques, skills and knowledge of how the search engines rank sites to manipulate a site into a top ranking, ethically. On the other side you have the search engines who's job is to provide their users the highest number of most relevant results.

Somewhere along the line the SEO professional turned into the figurative (darth vadar) in the search engines eyes as they now look at the SEM as "Spammers". A good example is when Inktomi accidentally left their
Spam Database open to the public. Virtually making aware blackhat techniques and
calling out close to a Million URLs for spamming.

Inktomi's main purpose of implementing these types of filters is basically to limit the amount of spammy sites you might see. Sites like porno sites, spammy sites and domains, affiliate sites and SEO companies.

Since then all major search engines have picked up some sort of way to filter out techniques used by SEM's. I'm not just talking about black hat techniques either. I am also talking about White hat techniques! The use of normal SEO tools any SEM would use have become under attack as well. For example, take a look at the Google back link checker. Have you ever thought why does MSN and Yahoo show hundreds of links tracing back to my domain but Google only shows a few? As this question is still being debated, it is pretty obvious that this tool is just being manipulated by the Search Engine because the only people checking back links are SEM's and the less information a search engine can give us the easier it will be for them to control their results.

The hunt continues with the recent call out and
ban of Traffic-power.com and some of their client sites. It is not a policy of Google to confirm or deny these things but as of late they have been changing their policies in hopes of educating webmasters of their guidelines.

Building a conservative link campaign is something 5 years ago us SEM's didn't have to really worry about but this too has been filtered in the search engines. I was building a link campaign for a car site and it was about 300 inbound links gained within a month and my site was banned from Google's index. Now 300 inbound links might not be that big of a deal to an older more known site but for a site no one has heard of before I think it raised a red flag back at the Google camp! I was able to get re-included back in their index about 3 weeks later but now I am going whit hat with the site to prevent this from happening again.

Recently we have seen evidence that
"hand jobs" are being done as well. So not only do SEM's need to worry about algorithmic filtering but also people sifting through SERP's to find anyone not in compliance with a search engines guidelines.

Where does this leave the SEM's?

As new filters are created they are also detected and broadcast through forums and other SEO and webmaster community sites. The use of the nofollow tags can be utilized to make spiders not follow and index pages you DON'T want the SE's to see. Like I said before, Search Engines and SEM's are co-dependant so as long as there is a Search engine there is a need for a SEM although our techniques are ever changing, they will have guidelines which allow us the ability to see what it takes to get rankings for them. Through the use of forums, blog's and enthusiast sites we are able to discuss what has worked through trial and error. This is our only line of defense since the Search Engines don't normally broadcast what they are doing and their intentions.

Till next time stay connected to whats going on in the SEO world and fool around with some test site's and experiment with different techniques to see what effects you get!