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Game Google, Help the WorldWhy search-engine optimization makes the Web a better place.

By Chris WilsonPosted Friday, May 9, 2008, at 4:02 PM ET

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A big site like this can be tough to shake from the top of a ranking. "It's very easy to change up the mix-up in the second page or the bottom of the first page" of the results, says Andy Ball, the president of USWeb, an SEO firm. Drowning out unflattering material in the two or three spot, on the other hand, "is going to take a long time and a lot of effort."

This is the fundamental arms race of the Web right now, and it bears a strong resemblance to natural selection; companies with robust sites that play nicely with Google's spiders—that is, its army of bots who read and index pages—are rewarded with more eyeballs and better odds of survival.

There's one important caveat: The search engines write the rules, and they can rewrite them to discourage people who find a loophole in the system. They can remove and redeem individual players on demand, counsel the lower organisms in ways to succeed, and ruffle the playing field at will. (The New York Times reported last June that Google makes about a half-dozen changes to its algorithm a week. A Google spokesperson told Slate that the company averaged more than one change a day in 2007.)

If—and this is an important if here—search engines write and maintain the rules to reward good behavior, like entering relevant keywords and metadata that help connect search terms with content—then searching will become a better experience for everyone. So long as sites are rewarded with higher ranking for making their sites more search-friendly, competition will spur better, more relevant results.

As it stands, many companies are still very poorly optimized for search, making it harder for them to get noticed and harder for people who are genuinely interested in their sites to find them.

As companies begin playing SEO hardball, other content providers, like media sites, will have to improve as well, spurring innovation from both parties. It helps Google, too, because it gives them better material to work with when deciding, across a broad spectrum of sites, which ones are more relevant than others—an admittedly vague qualification. In their 1998 research paper that introduced Google, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page acknowledged that this quality is in the eye of the beholder. As they wrote, the maps that their algorithm created, using hyperlinks from other sites as the fundamental electors of relevance on the Web, provided "an objective measure of its citation importance that corresponds well with people's subjective idea of importance."

As companies spend more money paying other sites for a few good links, for example, search engines will have to get smarter about detecting paid links, all with the goal of rewarding Web sites for behaving in ways that make them easier to search and target for specific, relevant pages.

The burden falls to the search engines to build and maintain an environment that can turn this inevitable arms race for rankings into precise search results. Thus far, they have proved to be a decent bet in this task.

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Chris Wilson is an editorial assistant at Slate in Washington, D.C.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
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