JLH Design

Warning: copy() [function.copy]: Filename cannot be empty in /home/jlhdes/public_html/wp-content/plugins/mytube/mytube.php on line 220

As the title of this post suggests I’d like to take a look at probably one of the most common questions asked by fellow webmasters. So you’ve got your site listed in all of the major search engines and managed to not go supplemental in Google. Congratulations, you are 3% there! Now come the hard stuff.

Generally the conversation starts out with the webmaster asking whether or not they have tripped the [insert penalty here]. Penalties are often rumored explanations for patterns that thousands of observing webmasters come up in watching the search engines. Such penalties have gotten some traction with names like the sandbox, duplicate content, -30, -950, or thin affiliates. It’s reassuring to people to think that they have simply made a mistake of forgetting their META description so their site is thrown into oblivion or that they used a keyword density greater than xx.xx% so that must be the root cause. Many people spend way to much energy trying to A) understand the flavor-of-the-month-penalty, B) deciding if they suffer from it, and the C) looking for the magic bullet that will get them out of this mysterious penalties grasp.

If you’ve seen the movie Contact written by Carl Sagan, you’ll remember a principal cite called Occam’s razor. Basically this states, “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.” In another way, “when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Assuming most of my audience doesn’t live on the Serengeti this will be germane. Rather than worry about the above penalties maybe the simplest answer is that the site is suffering from the MSSA Penalty. The My Site Sucks Ass (MSSA) penalty is probably the most common form of penalty most often dolled out by the big three, Google, Yahoo, or TSFKNAMSN (The search engine formerly known as MSN)

If your site sucks-ass you need to ask yourself one question. If I show up in position 950 for “my keyword” why are the 949 sites before me better? Considering that Google is a multibillion dollar company started by virtual geniuses an staffed with more PhDs than most universities perhaps sometimes, just sometimes, they actually get it right and correctly rank sites in order of their importance and quality.

Another fact that is often overlooked is that just as you are trying to rank for “your keyword”, so are thousands and thousands of other sites, and the distinct possibility that they have recently made their sites better than yours also exists. The nice thing about search engines is that they make your research easy for you. They list in order from 1 to 1000 the list of pages that they consider the best for said keyword. The information is there which ones are considered better than others. Certainly there are other reasons beyond your control such as the new spamming technique of the week that will propel a site to the top temporarily, but if you are serious about this your not looking for meteoric climbs but a solid base on which to build.

Bottom line is this, continue to improve your own site with fresh content and modern presentation and worry less about the changing search engine atmosphere and as they continue to do their job better if your site is truly better than the ones above it, you will eventually get there. On the other hand, if your site sucks-ass and Google just figured that out, you may be seen in the forums and newsgroups asking “is Google broke?”