I’ve talked about how the web is kind of like High School. The popular kids (websites) stay popular, and the uncool kids stay, well, uncool. Even if you were popular at one school, and moved to another school, it was still possible to become popular – because you knew what to do.
So let’s continue the analogy. It is always possible to lose your cool, or finally find it. There are many ways to do this, and we will explore the right and wrong way. Let’s look at The Rebel and how he can be cool/known, even if for just a bit.
The School Rebel
All High Schools seem to have “The Rebel”. Actually, there are usually a group of them. You might know them by different names, but they don’t feel like they have to play by the rules. They can become popular by different means.
The most common way of getting the attention of everyone is to perform some daring feat. Usually this feat is dangerous (like picking on the school bully), and/or illegal (like setting fire to the teacher’s lounge). But everyone knows your name, and some might even praise your name. That is until you are hauled off by the cops, kicked out of the school, and/or put in the hospital – in which case you are quickly forgotten.
There seems to be a correlation between the rise to fame, and the size of dramatic fall.
The Web Rebel (wears a black hat)
The web has a similar method to garner attention. It is called Black Hat SEO. The “Black Hatters” out there try to manipulate the system. There are several methods that they use such as:
- Creating dozens to hundreds of sites to link to the site they want to rank well.
- Stuffing excessive and unrelated keywords into the web page, and then
- Trying to be coy and hide the unnecessary text (this is called cloaking) in various ways.
- Actively looking for new ways to perform these and other devious tricks.
Digg saw this when people started paying to get their site dug. Every search engine has seen some form of results manipulation, whether it be from auto generating sites, or paying people to be on popular sites to get the rank authority. And any other method for which people will try to get information from, someone will try to manipulate.
Short Term Gains
Once these schemes are uncovered, the affected services start to work on ways to thwart the Black Hatters. Just as the school administrator didn’t like being duped, these services don’t like it as well. Once they figure out how to stop the Google Bombing, or other related tricks, the Black Hatter’s site(s) lose their popularity.
There also seems to be the same correlation as to how fast you rise in the rankings. The sites that monitor things like this seem to track these rankings, and recognize non-normal rises to fame. They can then “banish” you and your pages/site from their service if they deem it necessary.
This is how yesterday’s wonder kid becomes a forgotten memory.
The Semi-Rebel / Gray Hatter
If you remember correctly, there were also the semi-rebels in school. They would smoke in the bathroom, take the lunch money from the underclassmen, and generally repeat their senior year two or three times. They were known, but not as much, and instead of being kicked out of school, they would be suspended from time to time.
On the web, these are known as Grey Hat SEO techniques. These are the types of things that you know are not right, but they aren’t going to kick you out of Google for. However, there will still be a slap on the wrist type of situation if the problem is deemed as starting to get out of hand. This will of course hopefully dissuade others from trying it. This may mean removing your pages from the search engine for that key word/phrase; it might mean moving your page(s) to the supplemental index, or losing some of your ranking.
This is seen all of the time, and any time Google or any of the other search engines make a change to how they calculate who ranks where, it will adjust each person on the list. Sometime they go higher, sometimes they go lower. And this may not be because you have done anything wrong. The search engines are trying to find what they think is the most relevant content – even if we all know that
your page is the most relevant page.
So how is one to gain popularity, without being kicked out of school/Google? That will be the topic of our next discussion.
About Walter Wimberly