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Web site owners act as if search engines are neighbourhood dignitaries: "We must tidy up, search engines are coming to visit". An anxious time follows while your website, brushed, polished and optimised to best of your ability, waits to greet these visitors. The most respected visitor is Googlebot. He causes most anxiety and is renowned for being unpredictable. Webmasters try to analyse "Googledance" in hope of making Googlebot's visit enjoyable. If we can get mighty Googlebot to dance instead of merely crawling, he might give us a good report, but Googlebot can't seem to decide what algorithm he prefers. How are you supposed to get his feet tapping? Unfortunately, search engines are not most communicative visitors and you only realise they have carried out their examination when something (either good or bad) happens to your protégé's page rank.
The search engines are not like your school teacher who gives you a class test, they are more like university Board Of Examiners: when you have passed or failed their test, you will never get to know which questions you got right or where your weakness lies. Further improvement will have to be a matter of guesswork but suppose your guess is wrong? You might destroy very things which met with search engines’ approval. Then you hear that search engines don’t agree amongst themselves, so what pleases some of them might lose you points with others. Which ones should you try hardest to impress? Should you turn your website into some sort of private Googledancer and risk offending rest of robots? Would it be better to try to please one or two of larger search engines or a big bunch of lesser ones? Finally you hear a rumour that search engines are changing their secret rules anyway but nobody knows what changes will entail. You despair of ever satisfying masters of your fate, you feel as if you are stumbling around in dark. Panic takes you over.
Should you be afraid of search engines?
Anybody in his right mind should be afraid, very afraid.
This is one of a series of articles published by the author, Elaine Currie, BA(Hons) at http://www.Huntingvenus.com For honest advice on working from home subscribe to Online Profits newsletter by mailto:huntingvenus@SubscribeMeNow