In today's Guardian, I've written a little bit about search engine optimisation. The hook for the piece was relatively simple: I created a website (more of a page, actually) and spent a couple of days trying to see what effect different SEO techniques had on its ranking.
The site (ecofriendlyflipflops.co.uk) is no longer online, but inside a couple of days - and with little more than a sequence of links - I managed to move it approximately 11,000 places up a specific query. I intentionally kept the remit of the exercise very limited, didn't spend hours tracking the PageRank, and didn't engage in any of the more serious tactics of the bad guys (spamming, fake blog networks etc).
So what does this show us? Well, as a scientific experiment, the answer is not much. As I said, it was limited in scope and in emphasis. But as a grounding in the concept of dirty optimisation, it proves the point: this stuff can work, and this game goes on every single day.
You may not think search engine ranking matters much any more. After all, we're all savvy now, aren't we? I don't agree. Vast numbers of people use Google, and they trust it to an extent which sometimes borders on the ludicrous. As I state in the article, research indicates that more than 10% of all visits to online shops are the direct result of a Google query. People are trying to abuse that trust left, right and centre: and if any search engine fails to keep up in this struggle, then it fails its customers.
