Guarantees, The Honey Badger, & SEO
Pin It“Why would someone put a guarantee on a box? Because they know they sold you a guaranteed piece of S***! That’s all it is, isn’t it? Listen, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got the spare time.”
-Chris Farley, Tommy Boy
The point, although not eloquently put, is increasingly relevant to today’s small business. Guarantees, even lifetime, have legal limitations. Guarantees that aren’t possible to attain in all cases but claimed in advertising is not only misleading—it’s fraudulent. What we are talking about are the rise of “quick buck” B2B firms, and how they can all claim to get you to that #1 ranking in Google.
I sense you are belly laughing, because you know the score. For those that don’t, claiming you can get anyone to #1 in the search rankings is like getting approached by a creeper in the bar who claims he is a CIA agent and in his pants is the microchip that they are after. It’s up to you, to save the world…
Okay just a bit of poetic license I suppose but it’s not what it seems and isn’t what works. The reasons are plentiful, but we’re going to look at a few for this blog:
- Search Engines’ formulas are a trade secret
- Search Engines’ formulas constantly change
- Search Engines’ primary focus is delivering relevance to the search user only. Just like Honey Badger, Google don’t care. Google don’t give a shit. It’s just bad-ass.
The formula for each of the search engines is like Coke’s. Exclusivity is in the intellectual property and in its core competency. Simply put, you don’t go violating the “#1 rule of Search Club, and talk about Search Club.” It would be enterprise suicide to let everyone who could make a buck off of gaming the rankings and skewing the results for users.
So, to combat those who label their feces and try to apply a puff of perfume and a bit of polish…the search engine companies change their formula.
Inside the head of the engineer at Google who spots someone trying to game the search rankings:
“Oh, so you think that by dumping miles of ‘invisible’ keywords throughout your site will get you ranked higher? I don’t think so! So you want to make a few thousand pages with a small tid bit on a popular search terms and then linking to your ecommerce site? Aw, hell no!”
You get the point. It’s warfare between
SEO/SEM riverboat gamblers and the search engine companies, and it’s kind of like the warfare between medicine and germs. Every time someone comes up with a way to “guarantee” a first search ranking (independent of the value to the end user-the searcher); Bing flings a ping and hits them in the ding-ding. Yahoo make the yahoos yell “yahoo!” Google…well the Search God banishes you to Elba. No more high horse for you, and get your hand out of your vest. Weirdo.
The search companies want what you want…to find what YOU want. Not what a marketer wants you to find. So how the hell do you combat that?
Be relevant. And
call us. We’ll help you be more relevant.