Don't Get Tricky.

The google SEO guide offered up a lot of information on making a website more likely to be picked up by a search engine. This topic is particularly relevant with the strong advertising that bing.com has been running in an effort to pull users to their site from the dominant google. There are many methods for making your website more search oriented, many of which I was unaware.

Perhaps the most puzzling to me was the advice that the google .pdf gave on url's.

At one point it says, "Also, it can create easier, 'friendlier' URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words."

This seems funny to me as I have never found a url to be "unfirendly" or "cryptic". I suppose that linking up a really long url can be annoying simply because you have to make sure that you copy the entire url, but I can honestly say that I have never been offended or discouraged by a url with many numbers.

The two blog posts that I read were about google handing out penalties for using certain anchor tags. As i fought may way through the nerd jargon of this gem (http://www.wolf-howl.com/google/google-profiles-seo/) I had trouble extracting meaning. I think that this was partially a result of being unaware of google's seo methods. I think that he was bitching about bloggers accepting gifts in exchange for seo preference. This brings up a question of journalistic ethics. Being that bloggers are not beholden to a news agency (unless they are blogging for a news site) they enter an ethical gray area in whether it is ethical for them to accept gifts.

In the other blog that I read (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild) the author discusses putting references to websites that were unrelated to the topic of the website in the anchor tags and such. This annoyed users to the point where they were complaining to google and his company got some bad press. This suggests that users will not look at a site simply because it comes up in a google search, and that if there is some trickery going on the user will have an adverse reaction to the company responsible. This is yet another reason why simplicity is best when trying to improve SEO. The best rule is to simplify the search for both the user and the search engine.