There will perhaps always be an unsettled difference of opinions on what exactly search engine optimisation (SEO) is. There is one camp that thinks it is about making a website fit what the robotic search spiders and algorithms are looking for, then there are those who think it’s just an adjunct to classic business marketing. There are people who think it’s a bit of both, too.
The problem with just tailoring your website to the algorithms is that you are focused on what Google needs in order to give you a high rank, instead of traditional business methodology such as “how can I reach the right customer with the right message”?
Gaming Google has become a difficult affair of late, because of all the changes (see Act natural. The Penguin is looking). However, Searchengineland reminds us, in a new article titled Yes, Bing has search quality raters, that no matter how much an SEO person tries to game the system, there are always human judges that could take a proper look at the site and judge it from a human perspective.
Anyone thinking about SEO should be thinking, “Does my website pass the SEO Turing test?” Does it pass muster as a website that is written by humans, for humans, meeting a need that humans have?
In Searchengineland’s article, we are told that Bing’s quality rating team judge a web page on whether it suitably matches intent. For example, if someone searches for “how to fit an oil sump” and your page appears, the raters will judge whether your page is going to be a perfect response to the likely intent of the searcher, or is it just a spammy, robotic collection of useless content that is going to leave the searcher dissatisfied? Both Bing and Google employ these teams of humans to rate pages. Clearly they don’t look at every page every day, but they could come knocking on your door at any time, so it’s important to remember that websites are for people, not for robots.
