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Black Hat Series No.3 - Search Engine Guidelines

Posted by: Andy on 31 May 2008 @ 1:42 pm Category: Search Engine Optimisation

This is post #3 in "The Black Hat Series" - a series of blog posts aimed at educating website owners about the promise and pitfalls of Black Hat SEO strategies and techniques. The last post in this series described some of the implications (i.e. penalties) of using optimisation strategies which contravene search engine guidelines.

This post looks at some of the guidelines outlined by the major search engines, and discusses the pros and cons of following them.

Why Search Engine Guidelines?

The aim of pretty much all search engines is (or should be) to provide the best possible results for any given search query. A Search Engines "job" is to consistently provide links that are useful and relevant to the users search query.

If a search engine fails to provide good search results, it will be of little use to searchers - so they will be unlikely to return.
(there is of course a responsibility on the user to enter sensible, well structured queries - but that's a topic for a whole other post).

Search Engines use a variety of methods to determine what a page/site is about. Apart from the recent resurgence in human edited directories/search engines (such as Mahalo), most of the major search engines currently rely on an automated software process (called a crawler or spider) which follows links and gathers information about the web pages it visits.

Once this information about page contents is gathered, Search Engines may use a different process to determine the "quality" of this content (which takes into account other factors such as backlinks), and finally, when a search query is submitted, another process comes into play to determine the relevance of all the pages the search engine has determined as being related to that specific query - and ranking the results in an order that is most likely to be useful for the searcher.

Because it helps Search Engines to provide more relevant and better quality search results, it is in their own interests to provide information as to how web pages can be created to make it easier for their spiders to crawl and index.

So what are the guidelines ?

Each of the major Search Engines (and many of the minor ones) publish guidelines as to the types and structure of information they recommend. Although there are some differences across different Engines, they each follow a similar basic structure which (probably unsurprisingly)includes many of the fundamental "MANTRAS" of Search Engine Optimisation :

• good quality unique content
• descriptive Page Titles
• sensible use of keywords in content and Headings
• use of alt tags on images
• good linking techniques (internal and external)

We suggest that you review (and understand) Webmaster or Page Development Guideline for each of the major Search engines as listed below :

Google Webmaster Guidelines

"Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site, which is the best way to ensure you'll be included in Google's results.

Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines," which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index.

Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites."

Live Search Guidelines for Webmasters

"The best way to attract users to your site, and keep them coming back, is to populate your pages with quality content that users are interested in. MSNBot and other Web crawlers can help by making your site available to a broader audience.

We've provided recommendations that may help MSNBot and other Web crawlers effectively index your site. We've also provided a list of items and techniques that MSN Search discourages."

Yahoo! Search Site Guidelines

"Yahoo! strives to provide the best search experience on the Web by directing searchers to high quality and relevant web content in response to a search query.

Yahoo!'s Site Guidelines are designed to ensure that poor quality pages do not degrade the user experience in any way."

White Hat vs Black Hat ?

Good White Hat SEOs know and understand the Search Engine Guidelines for all major Search Engines - and use this knowledge to optimise their clients web sites - within the guidelines - to ensure that the optimised sites have the best possible opportunity of being found, indexed and well ranked for relevant keyword phrases.

Good Black Hat SEOs, also know and understand the guidelines, but use optimisation techniques which are either borderline, or blatantly outside the guidelines - often to try and "trick" the search engines into providing good rankings, where the content may not otherwise be relevant.

Alkso take a look at #4 in the Black Hat Series, where we review what options you have if your site has been penalised for the use of Black Hat optimisation techniques. and how you can go about getting your site re-listed in the search engines.

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