The search engines are the gatekeepers of the web. The majority of web traffic flows through their increasingly controlled gates. As the gatekeepers search engines have truly incredible power. Respect that power if you want to see some of that traffic directed towards your site.

Resenting their power won't do you any good. Complaining about search engines will just draw smiles on the faces of the successful few who have recognized that search engines just want to be your friends. You can get by with a little help from those friends. Powerful friends are a good thing.

Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. Each friend in the relationship has needs the other satisfies. Clearly webmasters have needs the engines can satisfy. Less obvious are the needs of the search engines. Most webmasters fail to understand and appreciate the needs of the engines. I believe this widespread failure is a major flaw in the current system.

If you understand how search engines work and that their primary goal is to deliver high quality - i.e. relevant search results - then you can start to understand how difficult their job really is. It has got to be hard to rank the relevancy of millions of web pages when the systems can't really know what the pages are about. The search engines aren't able to read the pages as you or I can so they perform complicated data analysis to try and guess how the pages relate to certain keywords. Users are satisfied when the guesses are reasonably accurate. Satisfied users translate into loyal users which the search engines need to survive in their highly competitive business. Over all I'd say the system works reasonably well. The system's weak link continues to be the vast number of shortsighted webmasters who try to scam the engines every chance they get. The engines are seen as a system to be hacked and exploited without regard for the ultimate implications. Every search engine trick further dilutes the quality of search results. Every loophole fix further complicates the job of the webmaster.

Many frustrated webmasters wonder why the search engines are so secretive about how they position search results. The most common answer is that it has to do with the highly competitive environment in which they have to operate - always trying to provide better search results than their many competitors. I'm sure that's a major part of it. I believe they also recognize that the more frank they are, the more exposed they are to abuse. They operate in an environment where any "weakness" will be exploited by thousands of webmasters who see it as a game - who don't moralize or foresee the implications.

Please continue on to see how the game is played ...
If you are in a hurry, just follow the "forget playing games" link below and jump right to my page on ethical search engine positioning techniques.

How the game gets played out ...

Forget playing games - work with the search engines ...

A discussion of the tricks some webmasters use to manipulate or skew search results in favor of their websites.

Practical advice on helping the search engines direct highly targeted traffic to your site - no trickery or con games.