As an ethical (and effective) search marketer, you spend your time diligently trying to create good content, providing an excellent user experience, and generally striving to delight your current and future customers. But some marketers have succumbed to the dark side, and the black hat tactics they utilize cause major headaches for both search engines and up-and-up marketers alike.
That’s why all major search engines have Web spam quality control teams. It’s the job of these teams to keep one step ahead of the bad guys, ferreting out dubious or downright egregious content and making sure it doesn’t show up in search results. And two of the top cops who lead the largest of these enforcement operations are Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester.
You name it; they’ve seen it all when it comes to trying to bend, break or shatter search engine rules. But they are also well aware that in many instances, it’s mistakes, not ill intent, that trigger alarms. To ensure that their search engines deliver the best results, they constantly strive for a balance between weeding out garbage and doing outreach to educate search marketers about best practices as well as things to avoid.
So, how do they differentiate spam from quality content? How do they spot and identify outbreaks of new black hat tactics? How do they decide whether to penalize or even ban pernicious sites from their indexes? And what signals do they use to determine that innocent mistakes have been made, and then proactively reach out to help marketers and publishers avoid “search engine jail?”
At SMX West 2013, you’ll learn the answers to these questions and more during The Search Police: Matt & Duane’s Excellent Search Engine Adventure. In this session, moderated by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan (who’s also seen it all in the years he’s been observing and writing about the search landscape), both Matt and Duane will share examples of what not to do and why, ranging from accidental mistakes to horrifying spam, as well as general tips directly from the search engines on how to succeed with them.
Don’t have your ticket yet for SMX West? Check out the full agenda here, and make sure you register by February 1 to save with early bird rates!
Related Topics: Channel: Other | SEM Industry: Conferences | SEM Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & DMD Alerts
Like This Story? Please Share!
Like Our Site? Follow Us!
Follow @sengineland