One of the unusual complaints we hear in the SEO industry is that a competitor’s site doesn’t “deserve” to rank so highly. Usually, the person making the complaint is an SEO customer who may have personal knowledge of an adversary’s character or business practices. Unfortunately, Google and other search engines do not take this information into account when showing search results, and (also unfortunately) some of the less ethical competitors for top phrases will not be afraid to use SEO tactics that aren’t as “white hat” as ones that we would feel comfortable recommending. Nonetheless, our goal for customers is to bring them as close to the #1 spot as possible, and in doing so we usually try to make sure their site “deserves” to hold that spot in the eyes of the search engines.
People have become so used to finding relevant information in search engines that they often believe that the result constitutes an endorsement of the site itself. This could be because people have been conditioned by hierarchical lists, and expect the “best” site to be #1, when in reality Google, Bing, Yahoo, and prior search engines are trying to give you the result that is “most relevant” to your keyword. While there may seem to be a fine line for distinction, anyone who had to dig through a batch of results to find the right item can tell you that rankings are not always the best indicator of results.
Site owners who use search engine optimization techniques to improve their search results don’t necessarily care about relevance as much as they want to get traffic that is cheaper than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Of course, search engines have been working very hard to find the “top” site for subject matter, but these engines can only use the information that is provided to them. Therefore, a great resource for a user’s search might not even be listed in the top 100 results because of code issues of a failure to conform to SEO rules.
Search engines have to use some rather artificial cues to see if your site is the right fit for an average user’s query. Because Google and Bing use link popularity as a determining factor, they are essentially using “the wisdom of crowds” to determine whether your site is sufficiently relevant. For a new site, it is hard to horn in on this “popularity contest” without some serious marketing efforts and even then your SEO and link building campaigns may be running up against juggernauts that can outrank your biggest keyword just by adding a new page to an already trusted site.
Despite the fact that search results don’t count as endorsements, this doesn’t mean that you can’t take pride in a top search engine ranking, which is usually an achievement in itself. Your ability to put a site at the top of Google, Yahoo, or Bing is going to generate traffic and sales because the average user still treats these results as a tacit approval of the site’s content. Search engines are aware of this too, since they will often put out warnings about sites that “may harm your computer.” (Why they don’t immediately remove a known harmful site is another question.) A ranking on a search engine is like something you can point at, and whether your adversaries “deserve” to have their listings, you will almost certainly feel happier if your listing is higher up on the list, since that makes you a more prominent choice when people come looking for your services.
Tags: endorsement
