Search Engine Issues

Directories are natural competitors to search engines. Anyone using a directory is not, at least at that moment, using a search engine. In what has to be a grossly anti-competitive practice, search engines attempt to scare web site owners and developers away from using directories with vague threats to downgrade their search engine rank.

Google and other search engines use incoming links to a page as part of their algorithm that determines page rank in search results, essentially an indication of site popularity. Some web site owners "game" this aspect of search engine algorithms by placing links on pages having nothing to do with the linked page, or worse, having no purpose whatsoever except to temporarily fool search engines. Other spam techniques involve putting spam links on parts of pages unlikely to be seen by human visitors, using small type for spam links, using spam link text color the same as background, or other page design tricks intended to fool search engines and not intended for human visitors. Sleazy operators continuously establish new domains for this purpose. As we all know all too well, search results still link to many useless sleazy sites despite the continuing best efforts of search engines to suppress them and the machine-generated site descriptions in search results are frequently misleading. One of the benefits of using a reviewed directory like SeekOn is the higher quality of the links and linked-to sites.

However, search engines can easily adjust the algorithm weight given to incoming links from any long-established domains like SeekOn according to any secret criteria they choose. In other words, links coming from long-established domains like seekon.com, yahoo.com, dmoz.org, nytimes.com, wikipedia.org, or blogspot.com, etc. are not a problem for search engines and vague suggestions otherwise are bogus.

Directories are not the only instance of a gross conflict of interest between web sites and search engines. See http://www.searchenginehonesty.com.

 

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