It Makes Sense to be Honest

Since the dawn of search engine optimization service by pioneering companies in 1996, many grandeur promises have been made, often with little result. In fact, it has been the case that if the offer is too good to be true, then it is just that.

However, there are many SEO companies these days that offer good service, that adhere to the guidelines that search engines expect and demand, and set reasonable expectation levels for service performance and results.

Whether you are performing the SEO work yourself or assigning it to a company, make sure that this service is performed ethically - for one very good reason. There are always those individuals that think they can beat the system and try, try, and try. Search engines are fast and powerful computer software and hardware and can outwit the dishonest person using its limitless capabilities and its highly astute designer individuals.

With all the tracking that computers can do, the number crunching, analysis, and traffic monitoring, you can be sure that sooner or later those that attempt to cheat will be caught and their website will be banned from the search engine indexing. So make your life easy. Follow the guidelines provided by search engine companies.

Also, honesty is much easier and once you get use to it, it grows exponentially.

Search Engine Guidelines

The bulk of the traffic to your website will most certainly come from search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. In fact most websites that do not spend a lot of money on pay-per-click advertising receive about 85% of their traffic originating from these 3 search engines.

Every one of these search engines have official webmaster guidelines that clearly specify what will get you into trouble and their respective censorship and banning policies.

Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Google’s guidelines strongly encourage close attention to “Quality Guidelines”, which outline how you can avoid being penalized and/or banned entirely from Google index. There are many organizations and online advocacies that suggest that Google censors many more sites than all other search engines and they question Google’s reasons for doing so with a hint that it may have something to do with competitive reasons (to get Google more advertising revenue). There have been documented cases where Google has used Trade Names as a search phrase for its advertising, although each time it was confronted legally, Google gladly pulled the search phrase from its advertising pay-per-click medium, as far as we know.

Yahoo: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/basics-18.html

Although Yahoo is keen to address deceptive practices and it offers it own banning policies, its guidelines are more concerned with the quality of the site. These guidelines suggest that sites with poor user experience may be subject to editorial censorship. Yahoo goes as far as explaining that it reserves the right to take “any and all action” it deems necessary to ensure the quality of its search engine. Yahoo refers to this as the Search Content Quality Guidelines and that it decides on what is ‘Original and unique content of genuine value”. This is explained by indicating that their intentions behind the guideline criteria is to ensure that poor-quality web pages do not degrade the user experience “in any way”. We believe that “Quality” is a very subjective matter and it could be used to penalize and ban sites that have no real reasons to be banned.

MSN Search: http://help.live.com/help.aspx?mkt=en-us&project=wl_webmasters

MSN Search guidelines for webmasters are very detailed and provide information on a variety of subject matters, including, a) content guide lines, b) ranking determination, c) indexing a description of the website, d) increasing site ranking, e) ensuring the correct indexing, f) submission, and more. Again there are some organizations and online advocacies that suggest that MSN censors sites for reasons that are not apparent from their guidelines and question MSN’s reasons for doing so with a hint that it may have something to do with competitive reasons (to get MSN more advertising revenue).

DMOZ: http://www.dmoz.org/guidelines/

The Open Diretory Project offers detailed guidelines which is quite comprehensive. Enjoy the read, it really is long.