Is (0.X% x Y) > (100% x 0) no longer true?

I came across Brook Shaaf’s VEO Book Report post here at ReveNews which also had some interesting comments.

It just ignited a Chinese band of fire cracker thoughts that I felt obligated to write down no mater the fact how late it is and that I should rather get some sleep instead.

(Sorry Jim for the lag of Links and the length of the post, no time to dig up all the important posts and news stories that were published about the issues over the last 8-10 months and more.)

I am following what’s going on with Google for quite a bit now. I was also spending some time with other Webmasters and the Search Engines themselves less than 2 weeks ago at SES San Jose.

What VEO Book is selling now are Search Engines selling for years with the difference that the “value” of the item sold increased with the time, because it got closer to the realities of every day online business practice and decisions made for search marketing efforts.

Don’t get me wrong. It seems to be a good book from what I heard about it. I have not read it myself yet. I played with the idea, but I don’t believe that the book can justify the over $0.50 per page price tag for me. It probably does for others, but I spent more time on the subject than most others.

I am sure that it will become more and more true and relevant as time progresses, but it seems provide a message that is a bit too “peachy” for my taste.

I think everybody is on the same page when it comes to the question: who should I have in mind the most when I design a site, the potential User of your Site that you try to target or the Search Engine?

The answer most people probably give, makes common sense when it was given 10-15 years ago as it does today:

The User of course!

If there wouldn’t be a user, you would not build a site in the first place. Without sites and no user looking for sites, search engines would also loose their purpose and cease to exist, making the discussion point less to begin with.

Well, in reality did technical details of the site design and content which tended to be not as user friendly (to say the least), have considerable impact on your search engine ranking.

The more user unfriendly the site became, the lower it converted. A nasty side effect. Now smart guys did the math with their calculators and tried to find out what the best is for the overall bottom line and the rest followed the rule that a conversion of 0.x% of Y number of visitors from a Search Engine is still infinite times more than a 100% conversion of 0 Users from Search Engines.

Fortunately did the engine a fairly good job over the past years to make the results of the equation shift more and more in favor of the quality for the user, making spammy methods that are in conflict with user friendly design and content less effective and some even completely obsolete.

The (0.X% x Y) > (100% x 0) equation is still true, but it is getting harder to find ways to increase Y to a number that makes any attempt to sell something worthwhile your time invested. The things that work also tend to work shorter periods of time than they did in the past.

Search Engines will continue on the path they are on, because it makes sense as I already mentioned earlier in this post.

The only on-page factor I worry about today is the title tag, but it should be anyway, because it makes your site more user friendly is you give things a descriptive title that matches what people are looking for.

It became a fairly new issue in affiliate marketing which is currently looming far to less discussed above our heads. I predict that it will be much more blogged about it in Affiliate Marketing community in the coming months.

When it comes to Search Engines, am I more concerned about Google’s “linking” problems (or Google’s problem with Links to be more exact), than about on-page / on-site SEO factors.

Google’s holy and patented PageRank™ algorithm is in jeopardy and Google knows it.

Google’s attitude is drifting more and more away from the real world opinions about linking by the general web community in an attempt to save their precious algorithm that made Google. to what Google is today.

This increasing drift makes honest webmasters become more often than in the past a victim of the so much feared Google penalties and bans. Sometimes individual pages only, but sometimes even whole Websites. This is a big issue all by itself and I will not go into more detail of that in this post. Keywords: Buying Links, Selling Links, Reciprocal Link Exchanges, Inter-linking your own websites, Affiliate Sites and Affiliate Links, nofollow attribute etc..

In the past were spammers and black hat seo practitioners banned under the pleased eyes of the search engine users and web community.

Google’s “Florida” update in 2003 put tons of spam sites out of business virtually over night and everybody who did stuff on the internet “the right way” and with the user in mind was praising Google and was lulled into a sense of false security enhanced by the charming words of Google PR Team and their overly praised Webmaster Guidelines.

“BigDaddy”, the “hey it’s only an infrastructure update and not an algorithm change” rollout earlier this year was different. A lot of spam disappeared, true, but a lot of legit and valuable content disappeared right along with it.
If you listen to Google it sounds like everything is fixed and peachy again, but the reality proofs otherwise.

Okay “Jagger 1 … x” did their part too. during last years holiday season, but I think jagger did actually hit the spammers primarily.

You might wonder why the Google Sitemaps Tools, excuse me, Google Webmaster Central Portal, saw this tremendous expansion over the last months. A lot of the expansions deal with “spam” (or not spam) and penalized website Issues. In case you didn’t know yet, you have now the means available to contact Google officially about issues with your site.

During fall last year did you have to post in a Webmaster Forum that is being read by Google Employees about the issues with your site and pray that one of the Google employees might picks it up and check with their engineers because they did feel pity for you.

And now, a contact form? Huh? yeah right. I am not kidding you. Some Webmasters that know Google for years from personal experience with it shake their head in disbelieve. Times changed man. It will be all good now. Or doesn’t it?

Well, now they have one and it will be around for a while. It’s not anonymous though, you have to register your site at Google and prove that you are controlling the site (automated validation process). What is next? A toll free Google 800-Support line for Webmaster Issues? … “If you think that your site was penalized by Google, press 1″

After “BigDaddy” should duplicate content and canonical urls be of much bigger concern for you than in the past. “google it” and you will learn find tons of content about it. By the end of the day will even my mom know what the difference between a 301 redirect vs a 302 redirect is.

Duplicate content does not have to be bad for the user, in fact the dupes are often the result of designing for the user and not the search engine in mind, but that is an Evening filling topic all by itself.

It is not the time yet to design Websites only with the user in mind and not worry about the search engines, but it I can at least say, that you should design your site and content primarily for the user but keep a watching eye on what the search engines are doing to avoid doing something good for the users that make search engines turn the back on you.

Alright, I changed the equation in the Title and the post from “0.X%/Y > 100%/0″ to “(0.X% x Y) > (100% x 0)”. Its the best way for everybody, because you nobody has to get his brain “fried” when higher mathematics would be applied to prove the original equation .

About Carsten Cumbrowski

Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur and Blogger. To learn more about me and what I am doing, visit my website and check out the “about” section.

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