How Google Failed

As stated on their website, Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Right.

As that may appear to be a noble quest, the Google machine is easy to manipulate. For a perfect example, proceed to Google and enter the phrase "miserable failure".

The #1 result links to the bio page of George W. Bush. Whether or not you agree with that statement is for political discussions, and I'm not getting into that here.

Point is, the results for that phrase were achieved because of one simple reason.

Links

That's right, you'll hear many arguements about content being king and linking is queen. While I do agree with that from a user perspective, it's not true for SEM purposes.

I do agree that content will make the user come back, but in order to get ranked in the coveted #1 spot, you need more links than your competitors.

Google's approach on this is that if you have more links pointing to your site than your online competition, your page must be more important that all the other 20 billion known web pages on the Internet.

There are many factors that go into getting a site ranked, and making it sticky, but if you were to build the absolute best site about widgets, adding a new page of content everyday (per Google's request, and you fulfilling their egomanaical quest to determine how you should run your website), and all I did was to slap together a one page site that highlights some features of the widget, while only going after links, and you build content, who's going to get the top spot?

The site with more links pointing to it, which would be mine.

This is why Google (and all the other search engines) fail when returning the results. True, they are just machines and the human programmers who create the secret ranking algorithm haven't been able to program comprehensive understanding into them yet - so until they do, you know what you need to do to your site to get ranked.

Links, links and more links.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com