Going With The Google Flow..

Okay, my other extreme white hat challenge thread was closed because "follow along" type threads are not allowed.. Fair enough. I am still doing the challenge and progress will appear on my 100 bucks challenge blog however.

To tie in with this I want to use this thread to discuss just how we can get sites indexed and ranked highly on Google for good keywords by doing things the way that Google would totally approve of. Why is this important? Well, we all rely on Google for most of our traffic and we use Adsense for monetization, Adwords for PPC etc.. Google, like it or not, own a lot of the web and we can either fight them and find it harder and harder to make a living online or go with the Google flow and make a good income online. Is that selling your soul to the evil Google? No, of course not. It is just plain good common business sense!

Google's webmaster guidelines are a good place to start and they split their guidelines into three categories.

1. Design and content guidelines
2. Technical guidelines
3. Quality guidelines

The rules are rules are pretty self explanatory generally with regard to design, content and technical stuff there are some grey areas in there but I am more concerned about the murky guidelines with regard to "promoting our sites" the right way in Google's eyes, in other words, the quality guidelines.

I am going to attempt to summarize each quality guideline and open it up for discussion.

1. Don't do anything on your websites that can be seen as deceptive or manipulative.

First of all, this is pretty much a "cover-all" guideline and can be seen as the most ambiguous one. What exactly does Google consider as manipulative or deceptive? They go further by also stating that just because they don't specifically mention a deceptive or manipulative technique in their guidelines doesn't mean that it is acceptable to them. So where does that leave us?

Sales copy can be seen as manipulative because we are attempting to manipulate our visitors into buying the product in our sales copy.. Does Google disapprove of manipulative sales copy? It could be argued that the long, long one page sales pages that we see so often in the IM world can be deemed as to manipulative for Google. Do a search for "keyword tools" or "SEO tools" and see if any one page typical massive headlined manipulative sales pages appear on page 1 of Google. Right, none of them do! Just standard ecommerce type descriptive, informative sales pages do like seobook, wordtracker etc.. Of course searches for product names will reveal these long pages but not for competitive "money" keywords.

That is just one aspect of manipulative behaviour.. What about manipulating our visitors into clicking on CPA links, ads, affiliate links etc.. This is a definite "no-no" in Google.

So how do we not do things that could be seen as manipulative? This is controversial and will probably get some heated responses from copywriters but I believe that the days of manipulative sales copy, affiliate product reviews etc.. like we normally see are numbered in Google's eyes. Certainly for the good money keywords that we want to be found for anyway. I can talk as I have some of those one page sales copy type pages myself! I am currently looking at new techniques of writing effective sales copy not manipulative.. What's the difference you may ask? I believe keeping things short, descriptive, informative but also above all "appealing" is the key skills that copy writers need to develop to do well in Google now.

So in short if you are doing things with your content that in your heart you feel is manipulating your visitor in some way then it probably is and as therefore Google will also. Next time I will discuss deceptive behavior.