What’s at stake makes it especially worrisome that you could possibly spam a search engine and
not know it. It wouldn’t be intentional, but the results would be the same. So, how do you avoid
this? How do you rank well without falling into the black hole that leads to search engine spam?
That’s an easy question to answer, really. There’s only one way to avoid accidently (or purposely)
ending up labeled as a spammer. Build your web site for your audience and not for a search engine.
Really, it’s that simple.
Here’s why: The purpose of a search engine is to find, index, and serve content to people who use
the search engine to find something. The search engine’s target audience is those people. And in an
effort to do the best job possible for those people, it’s going to look at every page it indexes in the
scope of what’s best for the searcher.
So, if you approach creating your web site in the same manner that a search engine approaches serving
content to its users, your goals will automatically align. And that natural alignment will keep you
out of trouble with search engines.
You should already know how to design your web site with the user in mind. But you can keep
a few guidelines in mind to make search engines see that your site is exactly what searchers are
looking for:
Provide users with unique relevant content. The most important element of your site is
probably the content that you put on it. Provide the information that users need to help
them understand, compare, or make decisions. Make it useful, and users (and crawlers)
will love you.
Use links appropriately. You want a good balance of links into and out of your site. You
can’t necessarily control all of the links that come into your site, but you can influence them
by participating in your industry. And when you build links that lead away from your page,
make sure they take users to other sites that are relevant and useful.
Keep your site user-friendly. Think in terms of the design elements that users like and
don’t like. And if you don’t know what those are, do some research, because plenty of studies
have been done. Among design elements that aren’t likely to gain you any love from your
users are Flash pages, frames, and difficult or changing navigational structures. Crawlers
don’t like these any more than users do. When you’re designing your site, consider using
a focus group to help you design the site in a way that users will be comfortable with. And
if users are comfortable with it, crawlers probably will be, too.
Don’t obsess over where your page ranks in search results. Yes, you want to have your
web site featured as high in search engine rankings as possible, but not at the expense of
everything else you should do to get your site in front of the right customers. Obsessing
over your rank leads to pouring too much time and money into making a search engine
happy. It’s a much better practice to obsess over giving your users what they need and
building loyal users.
Spam of any kind is bad. And no one wants to be labeled a spammer. But being labeled as SEO spam
is probably one of the most detrimental blows that your web site can suffer. So instead of focusing on
how you can make search engines like your site, focus on how you can make users like your site, and
search engines will naturally follow the users.
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