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Feeding the Google Monster

feeding google

How do the search engines eat?

Back in the day, search engines had a reasonable appetite for content. They would gobble up content by following links from one bit of content to the next. Often they got full pretty fast and would only index a little bit at a time. Sometimes you even had to poke them to eat more by submitting your site or site map to them. The search engines are really hungry now and for most web sites the top activity won’t be human visitors but search engines that feasting upon a site’s content and bandwidth. Submitting sites to the search engines is no longer necessary, they will find you whether you want them to or not. It isn’t just the case that they follow links anymore either. The search engines now can index servers. So if you are building a new site sometimes, it will get indexed unless you specifically block the search engines from grabbing the information. You can prevent the search engines from eating up your unwanted sites by using your Robots.txt file.

What do search engines like to eat?

People in the search marketing space will always tell you content is king and that the search love eating up much content as they can get. But what is content? Content is the text on a web page, if you can highlight the text then the search engines can read and understand it. So text used in images can not be read and is like empty calories. There is also rich content which involves 500+ words, includes images and video. The diet of the Google and the other search engines has increased shifted to feeding from rich content pages. Generally, rich content will as a result rank much better than content from pages which are deemed thin content pages. Currently, evergreen content and ever fresh content are the most loved. Evergreen content are pages with 1000+ words of text and that are also rich media pages. Ever fresh content (a term I actually just now made up) are pages that rich in newly added content, where the page is growing. Ever fresh usually involves comments or updates that prevents the content from going stale. Ever fresh is search engine food that has been warmed up rather than is just cold left overs.

What not to feed the search engines?

Google has diet restrictions or maybe it’s allergies to content that is not unique. Creating content which is just copied and pasted from some other site will give the search engines indigestion and they will not like you, if you do this to them. This even includes poorly spun content, where words are changed in a sad attempt to make the content look original. Google’s Panda update were all about dealing with this type of problem. To check if there are issues with your content use copyscape.com to verify that it is unique.

In summary, prepare your content food with love and you’ll receive search engine love (high rankings). Remember the search engines are hungry and it’s always feeding time.

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