Search Engine Optimization: Relevance Sold Out?

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In the October 6, 2003 issue of Business Week, the thin line between “natural” search results and advertising is brought under the microscope. The article, titled “Web Searches: The Fix is In” exposes a trend that many online marketers and search professionals have been concerned with for some time.

Among other things, the article mentions web marketers who found their sites downgraded, even below obviously less-relevant sites, on supposedly relevance-based searches, when they chose to stop forking over paid inclusion fees.

It would seem that building a relevant, informative, popular website is no longer enough to earn you good search engine rankings. You need to cross a few palms with silver as well. In fact, if this article has it right, money trumps content these days.

As a result, some search properties are delivering positive earnings surprises on Wall Street, which, in turn, is causing their stock prices to soar. Does this spell the beginning of the end for purely relevance-based search results? Are we entering a new era in Internet marketing where the rich get traffic and the poor get squeezed out?

The quest for shareholder returns does seem to have caused many of the major search properties to deliberately blur the line between organic results and paid placement. Where it used to be easy to tell the honest organic result from the advertisement, on many search sites today it takes an insider to tell the difference.

But this is really nothing new. In the magazine publishing industry, there is a line between editorial and advertising. “Spend all the money you want on ads,” they say, “but it won’t buy you good editorial coverage. You have to earn that the old-fashioned way.” The idea is that once readers realize that the editorial is tainted, they won’t buy the magazine any more, because most of us don’t buy magazines for the ads. And if a magazine loses its readers, the advertisers are right behind them, scrambling for the exit, because they’re paying by the eyeball.

Those of us who have worked in PR know that the line between advertising and editorial does get crossed, but if the violations are blatant, people eventually catch on. So the free enterprise system keeps the game honest, for the most part.

Four years ago, the search landscape was highly fragmented. While there were clear leaders like Yahoo and AltaVista, there were lots more players and nobody had anything like dominant share.

Fast-forwarding to today, almost half of all searches are input into the Google engine directly. If you count affiliate search sites where Google supplies results, the percentage of search results that Google delivers is much higher.

Why is that? Well, why do people search the web? To find information, advice, a product – things like that. Google has risen to the top because it has consistently delivered what searchers have wanted. More relevant and accurate results.

Despite the “only one click away” issue, people do tend to use a few engines consistently. Once they find one that works, they tend to stick with it. Until it starts wasting their time with lousy results.

Yahoo won’t let a business submit a website URL without paying a $299 fee. Google lets the same business submit for free. Neither engine guarantees indexing or placement. So if you’re a small business with a revolutionary new product and a limited budget and you don’t want to spend $299 on a fuzzy value proposition from Yahoo, you’ll submit your site to Google instead. And if your site is worthy based on relevance, Google will list it. Someone searching for your product will find it on Google and not in the Yahoo directory. Which means that Google has more information in its index. Guess whose search tool more and more people will be using?

We don’t want to pick on Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo’s index (as opposed to its directory) licenses Google’s search results. But we, and probably many others, appreciate that Google is very explicit about what is “editorial” and what is “advertising.” In fact, even if you advertise on Google, your ad had better be relevant because if less than ½ of 1% click on it in the first 1,000 impressions, it’s gone. Searchers see relevant results even in Google AdWords, advertisers are forced to police themselves, and Google doesn’t waste space on poorly written insertions that nobody cares about. Everybody wins. The rest of the search engine gang should take heed.