By : Nidhi Gupta

This article is not about unscrupulous search engine optimizers who mislead surfers by promoting web pages to the top of search results, only to automatically redirect them to completely off-topic pages and sites. Search engine optimizers here mean those people who promote relevant web pages and sites to the top of relevant search results for relevant search terms. These constitute the vast majority of search engine optimizers. These are ethical SEOs (search engine optimizers), and are the SEOs refered to in this article.

SEOs have exactly the same aim as Google; that is to see the search results filled with relevant web pages for any given search term. Both SEOs and Google strive for that. The only difference between Google and SEOs is that SEOs want to see one of their relevant pages at or near the top, whereas Google doesn’t care about individual websites. Apart from that, the aims and desires of both Google and SEOs are identical.

Its been realised that Google would like to index the natural web - a web that hasn’t been tainted by arranged link exchanges and modifications to pages and sites, for the purpose of improving rankings. But the web wasn’t in a natural state when Google arrived, and it will never be in a natural state in the future, so that ideal is something that Google can never have.

The reason that SEOs exist is because of the way that search results are returned - 10 or 20 at a time. It is common knowledge that not many surfers go deeper than the first few pages of results, and it is common sense that no search engine can display all the relevant results for a given search term in those first few pages. It is also common sense that many of the results that don’t make it into the first few pages are equally relevant with those that do make it, and many of them are much more relevant than some of the higher ranked pages.

The difference between those that are ranked at or near the top and those that are not is that the higher ranked pages have more PageRank, or better inbound link text, or their on-page criteria is better suited to Google’s algorithm, or a combination of such factors. Without SEO involvement, all of those things occur by chance, but chance isn’t a very fair way of deciding which pages are ranked highly and which aren’t, and chance isn’t a very fair way of deciding which sites get the traffic, the business and the profits and which don’t. Yes, Google can usually fill the top results with relevant pages, but their alogrithm cannot choose fairly when there are many relevant pages. No algorithm can.

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