Google provides an excellent service to the world, enabling us to search the web for information, products and whatever else we’re looking for. It even does the heavy lifting of determining which results are a “best fit” for our queries, providing us only with contextually relevant entries and ranking them in order of how trustworthy or authoritative those entries are. The higher-ranked a web page is, the more trustworthy Google thinks it is — which is good, because we’re probably only interested in clicking that first entry in the SERPs.
But this presents a secondary problem: rank manipulation. Motivated webmasters can undertake schemes and nefarious habits designed solely to manipulate their rank — and appear more trustworthy than they actually are.
Google, in response, has designed countermeasures to identify instances of rank manipulation and penalize or remove them, accordingly. But just how good is Google at detecting rank manipulation?
Before we get too deep into this discussion, it’s important to hash out the problems with defining “rank manipulation.”
Some examples of rank manipulation are egregious. In the early days of search engine optimization (SEO), it was common for people to spam keywords throughout their website to rank higher for that keyword term. For example, you might find a website simply consisting of the phrase “best pizza NYC” over and over again. This clearly serves no purpose other than keyword optimization, is bad for user experience and is unambiguous in its intentions.
Other examples are harder to define. For example, it’s considered rank manipulation to buy a link on another website for the purpose of boosting your rank; the same is true if you spam your link on another site, through something like a forum comment. If a publisher voluntarily chooses to link to your site, that’s perfectly acceptable. But what if you pay to have an article featured on a high-profile publisher site and your article happens to include a natural link back to your site? Is that rank manipulation or not?
It’s hard for human experts to define exactly what rank manipulation is, so it’s only natural that Google’s ranking algorithm would struggle as well.
Currently, if you’re found to be practicing rank manipulation, Google has two main tools to penalize you:
So what qualifies as “rank manipulation” in Google’s eyes?
Usually, it’s one or more of the following:
In other words, if you avoid these highest-priority violations, Google probably won’t be able to flag you for rank manipulation, even if the actions you’re taking are intended to increase your rankings.
How good is Google at detecting rank manipulation? It’s good, but it’s not that good. You’re not going to get away with obnoxious violations of Google’s webmaster guidelines. But if you’re genuinely trying to create high-quality work and provide good user experiences, Google’s not sophisticated enough to know your “true” underlying intentions.
The best SEO strategies today are ones that result in genuinely good content and good overall user experiences. So is it even fair to qualify these actions as “rank manipulation” in the first place?
Originally appeared in Entrepreneur