The Importance of Remaining Trustworthy and the Role Your Content Plays

SEOMoz has an entire page devoted to myths about search engines, and one of the most common myths still circulating is that you must learn clever optimization techniques to get ahead. For instance, they mention linking, keyword stuffing, cloaking and creating tons of low quality pages, and of course, the old “incestuous link”, which refers to low quality sites that are created solely for a link to another site.

All of these myths are partially based on truths, or at least a former truths.  When the Internet first went mainstream in the 1990s, there was rampant abuse of SEO and key wording, and most of the sites that used these dishonest tactics were rewarded with higher rankings…at least for a time.  However, as the 1990s ended and the 2000 era was ushered in, search engine companies (now multinational corporations who could afford lots of tweaking) worked hard to eliminate these SPAM techniques from affecting search rankings.

Technology has improved quite a bit, so much so that search engine submission is not even required anymore; some people even think that META tags are obsolete, which isn’t true, but still does show you how far we’ve come.

Here’s the point.  Now more than ever, as a content producer (whether you’re a directory, a portal, a magazine or even a company) you must take steps to ensure that you remain trustworthy.  We don’t simply mean trustworthy, as in Better Business Bureau approval, but rather, a trustworthy site in the eyes of the search engines.  How does one go about becoming a trustworthy site?

It involves staying away from “black hat” SEO techniques, though this is no brainer since search bots have learned to detect them.  However, this also encompasses other technicalities such as duplicated content, creating irrelevant or gratuitous links, using a poor link structure and anchor text, over stuffing your text body or META tags with keywords, and of course, farming low quality content.

The truth is that the biggest search engines can see through all of these second-generation black hat techniques, and most recently even somewhat reputable sources like E-How and EzineArticles.com paid the price for delivering up inferior content.  One of Google’s “Panda” changes was that of returning the most “trustworthy” sites, as opposed to websites that merely produce lots of average-quality content.

This change in the algorithm doesn’t merely mean big corporate companies have to pay attention, it also means sites that compromise the perfect user experience—as in sites that mostly consist of advertisements, or sites that have few external links—have to take notice too.

It is imperative that you take steps to remove low quality content, or gratuitous ads or links that compromise the user experience.  It’s not just content that is king, but the all important Internet viewer who is trusting in you!