Google is Once Again Off the Radar of Many Brands!
It is surprising to see that in 2008, despite the incredible role that the Internet plays for brands, many of them are careless with respect to their actions (or inactions) vis-à-vis search engines and, particularly, SEO (for Search Engine Optimization).
There are three main types of businesses that commit these S.E.O. “no-nos.” The first and most frequent type are the businesses that have never taken the time to become interested in the power of search engines. One example is that of French tutoring pioneer Cours Legendre (started in 1957) which has seen itself lose part of its market share to Acadomia, which in just a few years has become the largest academic tutoring service in France. The risk of this type of search engine negligence is that business can eventually cease to exist in the search engines…which would mean that the only way an Internet user could find your website would be if he/she knew its URL. This is a very common occurrence. It is also a danger for businesses with the same content loaded onto several domain names: .eu, .com, .fr, .net…in the eyes of Google, these are duplicate websites. In the majority of these cases, brands pay little attention to these sorts of issues and do not realize that they have become blacklisted (unindexing by search engines due to not following guidelines).
The second and “most dangerous” type of businesses are those that carried out SEO months or years ago, but who, for a variety of different reasons, eventually stopped. It is thus very easy to find hidden text, satellite pages, and other techniques (it is important to note that while hidden text is forbidden, it was “accepted” by search engines as of a few years ago and this technique was used by many providers). Thus, without knowing it, these businesses risk seeing their websites blacklisted by current and future search engines.
Lastly, there are the brands that decide to test SEO and choose between the “cheap” or the “all inclusive” service packages. Businesses must choose their service providers well. In many cases, the service providers themselves neglect to follow website norms and use dubious techniques. The client is often not equipped to tell the difference. Fortunately, these negligent service providers only represent a small part of brand supporting professionals.
Adapted by Jessica Hartstein
Tags: blacklisting, brand, Search engine, search engine optimization, SEO
