How Do Computers Talk to Each Other Over the Internet?

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Basic Marketing: How Come Search Engine Listings are Complicated?

How Come Search Engine Listings are Complicated?

I have been working in this field since 1996 and so remember when it all started and how.

Back in the day there were very few sites online. As the number grew a few people realized that there needed to be a way to find these sites. Therefore listing of websites or directories got started and a way to search the information also was created. These search engines were very simple, they just looked at the information on the page and listed it. If one page said the keyword more often than another, it got listed higher. Very simple and very easy to trick.

For example, imagine you are selling clothing for children. You have a children's clothing store, selling pants for boys and girls. You have a page up on your website about this and want it to show up on the search engines. Someone else works in a completely different industry, one that you don't want anyone under 18 coming across. They want their page to show up when someone searches for boy's pants and so they add those keywords to their page in a larger quantity than anyone else's.

There was even a point in time when they would write keywords in white letters aganist a white background, filling the page, but no one would see these "keywords" except the search engines. Becasuse they had more of a particular keyword on their page, they would show up first in rankings.

The search engines are run by companies and they are a business. So, they know that if people come to their service and don't find what they are looking for, they won't come back. So they started working on other ways to rank pages. It is in their interest to keep it a secret so that those websites that you need to be 18 to visit don't get listed in places they shouldn't be listed (and others like that).

There are other examples of people trying to get listed high for keywords that they shouldn't be. Some of them are really "bad" companies and some aren't bad but trying to undermine the listing of others.

When Google first came out they were the best at ranking pages and keeping out the spam from the search results. People loved the quality of the results and could find what they were looking for quickly.

Now a days, Google and the other popular search engines use over 200 individual checks to rank a page when someone types in a keyword. These include such things as how many links pointing to your website (used to be any link, now important is the quality of those links), mentions of you on social networks (used to be any mentions but now they have to be from "trusted" sources), how often your website is updated (used to be able to just have a website and now it needs to be kept fresh) and so on.

Honestly, no one knows them all, though Seach Enging Optimization (SEO) professionals work hard to learn them and keep track of the changes (the search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithm to improve the results and make it harder to get spam ranked well).

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