Archive for December, 2011

With a nod to Charles Darwin, who meant the phrase Survival of the Fittest as a metaphor for “better adapted for immediate, local  environment,” it will be interesting to us and of great importance to Search Engine Optimization gurus to follow the ongoing struggle for survival and dominance by Google and Bing and the “anti-spam” search engine, Blekko.

Right from the first days of the Internet and search engines called Excite and Webcrawler, the idea of search engines has been to help people find what they are looking for. Google rose above the rest with a complex algorithm that traced which websites liked others by linking to them.

This was better for websites than for people. Keywords and titles factored in and evolved continuously, but links were the name of the game.

Webmasters who excelled at the game could stand tall in the jungle of algorithms, beat their chests and boast, “me rank higher than you.” Website owners had to prove themselves by adhering to Google’s tastes and standards. Trickier sites found ways to use Google’s secret formula by playing at being a good site without having to create useful input. Spammers did well for themselves and searchers found increasing numbers of irrelevant results in their searches. Search engines had increasing complaints.

So the battle for survival and dominance keeps search engines constantly evolving. Google’s abrupt “Panda Update” earlier this year changed the game considerably, wiping out many well established rankings. New search engines pop up on a regular basis with the intent of out-doing Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has climbed to 30% of the market since it was started in 2009. Blekko, an “anti-spam” search engine has reached a million searches a day since its inception in 2007.

And now the game changes again. There is an astounding amount of data out there in the ever-growing world of social media and this is now factoring in as the search engines belatedly reach the conclusion that if people share your content, it’s probably quite good. Users were unable to vote for content with links, but they are now able to vote for content with clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings, and they are sending strong signals to the search engines about who they consider the fittest for survival.