Google Hates Commercial SEO

Imagine walking into a room with over a hundred people or more, you ask for their attention and you say you are looking for an accountant urgently because the IRS is on your tail. Naturally a handful quickly announce that they are accountants and would be very glad to help. And also charge you a hefty amount, you quietly think to yourself.

You have never heard of any of these people so who do you pick? You definitely need an accountant and desperately too. Almost automatically the said accountants start putting forward their credentials to you. What do they say?

1. They have been in business for so long
2. They have so many testimonials
3. Their experience is relevant
4. They have a big brand
5. They get so many customers per year and make so much turnover per year and so on and so on.

You quickly take a look and maybe even verify the testimonials and references quickly because their other customers are in the room and some of them are big businesses themselves. By this point you already have a mental top 5 list based on the criteria above. All this being based on relevance, expertise, proper fit to your needs and only thing left will be price negotiations etc.

So what's this got to do with Google?

Well my friend, using the above example YOU are Google. The top five accountants above are your page 1 list for the search term "tax accountants in your area". Your criteria is based on the above example which we can then break down into the following:

1. They have been in business for so long = Domain age
2. They have so many testimonials = Backlinks or link popularity
3. Their experience is relevant = Keywords and site optimization to show keyword relevance
4. They have a big brand = High PR website with backlinks from high PR websites (their big clients above)
5. They get so many customers per year and make so much turnover per year = Lots of traffic to their website

Now you are probably thinking to yourself - "fair enough but why would Google hate that?"

Well, out of your top 5 above Google is very impressed because they are ordered in the "natural" order of business. The biggest and most powerful business on the High Street or Main Street is number 1 in the index and so on. Excellent job! People search on Google and Google gives them "real and true" information of the world. But it does not work that way, does it now?

You see the person or business in position 5 has suddenly hired a shrewd SEO agent who has built tons of backlinks and superbly optimized their website to the point that they are now dominating every search in their industry. But, are they really the "true" leader in their industry? Maybe not. This is why more and more search engines are now withholding certain SEO data such as number of backilnks, indexed pages, competition analysis etc just to restore the "natural" order of search engine rankings.

As the science of SEO has developed, so have the SEO tools. One tool that you should be aware of is called a web crawler simulator. The web crawler simulator essentially shows you how search engines are viewing your website so you can respond accordingly, tweaking your SEO strategies to reflect the algorithms of the search engines.