I received a comment on the Are the Natural Search Results Bugging Out? Post from The Ninja Affiliate (which I’ll abbreviate TNA from now on) regarding some ideas that Mar and I were exchanging in the comments section of the post.

TNA made some interesting points about how all SEO is a form of spam, which I agree with, and some points about how Google hand manipulates the search results to favor large insurance companies, which I don’t. Here is TNA’s comment:

Every link that is purchased, asked for as a reciprocal and so on is spam. If you have to give something more than what your site can offer to get a link, that is spam. The search engine results that you don’t pay for are called natural search for a reason. Natural means it was earned with out you even asking or knowing about it. I hate to say it, but to some degree we are all spamers. White hat, as well. Any one in a competitive field that is successful is buying links; Google, Yahoo and MSN all know it. But what are they to do. There hands are tied. If they penalized on this 100% it would make all the big insurance companies disappear from the natural search result. I’m sure this is driving the engineers crazy. With that said it is true the big dogs get special treatment. This is where the comments by google saying they do not hand manipulate the result bug me. They don’t for all but for individuals they do. Lets say you got 300 links to a new domain and a well know insurance company did the same to a new domain they bought for them self’s trying to branch out. I guarantee your new domain will get healed out of the natural search a lot longer than the big insurance company. Computers/algorithm are just not smart enough to know the difference between the big company and little guy when they are new domains. There is no doubt that someone has their hands in it. If you check any competitive keywords in the natural search in the first page you will find bought or sponsored links (which is the same) on all the domains. Nothing will build a strong site better than name recognition.
The Ninja Affiliate

As I was writing my reply I realized that it would be best to turn the response into a post, since the subject of SEO as spam and SE hand manipulation are both important topics. So here is what I had to say back to TNA:

Good points Ninja…we all are forced to “spam” a bit, mainly because some “spamming” techniques like buying links and/or reciprocal links are the cost of admission into the upper levels of the search results. While this must certainly drive the Google engineers crazy, it also is a problem that they created - and as long as the first page of Google’s results continue to be prime real estate, people are going to try to get to the top. I guess I am just happy that Google doesn’t hand out positions based on market cap…which brings me to your next point.

I have mixed feelings on the hand manipulation issues you brought up. While it does seem like the big brand names get preferential treatment, I would argue that, at least in Google, they don’t. I have been watching the search results for the term “health insurance” for a number of years now. Three years back the first page was full of unknowns, not brand names. A glance at the big brands web sites showed why…they were very search engine unfriendly. In the last year or so many of the big health insurance companies have made improvements to the search engine friendliness of their sites (title tags, spiderable homepages, etc.).

In addition, these large insurance companies tend to have very well aged domains…since they usually purchased them early in the .com days. And as we all know, the older the domain, the more Google will let you get away with (i.e. rapid link building).

With on-page optimization and domain age issues under control, these sites tended to rank really well, even without a concentrating on building links. Why? Because big insurance companies draw quality links based on brand alone. These companies get quality .com, .edu and even .gov links as they are often cited as resources by news outlets, government agencies and student oriented websites. While getting these links has no real direct cost, I don’t really see these links as “free,” since large insurance companies spend millions building brand awareness that eventually leads to these links.

Overall, I would say that manipulation has very little to do with big brands dominating the Google results. I think the heavy reliance on quality links, which the big brands draw in as a byproduct of offline advertising) is more of the culprit.

Yahoo! is another story - their search reps. have admitted in the past to manipulation of results. I think this is a necessary evil for Yahoo! as their ability (or desire) to detect the quality of a link seems to be limited.

Thanks again for the bringing up an interesting and controversial topic Ninja…admittedly, I could be giving Google way too much credit here, but it’s just the theory I have come up with to feel better about how dang hard it is to rank well for terms like “health insurance” and “auto insurance.”

So what do you think? Am I delusional? Are the natural rankings in Google really natural, or are they modified to help out the big companies? Let me know your thoughts…

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