By Shari Thurow, Guest Writer
January 15, 2002
A special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2001 Conference, November 14-15, Dallas, TX.
Those who take extreme measures to rank well on search engines are likely to be labeled spammers. There are some clear no-nos, but it is mainly an issue of intent and proportion. In a session entitled "The Spam Police," representatives from Google, Inktomi, and FAST explored the issue of spamming the search engines.
To determine whether or not a search engine optimization strategy can be considered spam, Matt Cutts, Software Engineer for Google, said that webmasters should ask themselves the following questions:
(1) Does your web page's content help end users? Tricking end users to get to your useful content does not count.
(2) Would you perform on optimization strategy if the search engines did not exist?
(3) Are your pages automated? If so, Google does not want them in their indices.
"Essentially, we want the best search results on top," stated Cutts. "We want to get end users off of Google as soon as possible."