Google Baba Ki Jay Part 3

When a was a newbie web designer sooooo many years back, we used to be very excited when we counted so many 'hits' on our website. One of the first ever websites in India on trekking 'indiantreks.com' was made by me way back on 1998-99 when the Internet was so new. We used to do a lot of things to get in the top 10 in the search ranking, but at that time it used to be Yahoo and not Google.

The spiders used by search engines used to primarily look at 3 things:

1. The keywords in the metatags
2. The text in your page
3. The number of backlinks

We used many tricks to get into the top 10....

One was to have text and links in the same colour as that of the page. This kept the text hidden on the browser, but the spiders were fooled into thinking that the page had a lot of backlinks.

Second was to spam the meta tags with lots and lots of keywords, again for the spiders to take notice

I had paid Rs.3500/- to book the indiantreks domain, but as domains became cheaper, we used to book a lot of domains, make single page websites, each pointing to the target website, thus getting a lot of external backlinks.

All these methods were used by a lot of web masters and web designers. Today, it almost amounts to cheating. Google has seen to that.

Today, the key elements of an effective website

  • Appearance
  • Content
  • Functionality
  • Website Usability (including the website being VERY mobile friendly)
  • Search Engine Optimization

The most effective website will reflect best practices across all of these elements.

Please remember, Google's Penguin and Panda updates of their algorithms are now dynamic in nature, and the algorithms are constantly updated. The key to get a better ranking is NOT to use the tricks I have mentioned before, That will actually BLACKLIST your websites. There is NO magic button, no trick that Google doesn't know.

The only mantra that I can give is CONTENT, GOOD CONTENT and USEFUL, RELEVANT CONTENT. Ask yourself, is this what a visitor is looking for? If you by luck or by hard work do come into the first 10, but fail to keep updating your content, Google will automatically push you down in the ranks. And remember, it is an algorithm working. No one is personally responsible, except you, of course.

Google Baba Ki Jay!

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