We have written quite a bit about White Hat vs Black Hat in the past, in case you want to go have a look.

People have been using black hat SEO techniques to artificially manipulate organic rankings for a long time. And it worked. These individuals did everything from using invisible text stuffed with keywords to building massive link farms. The SEO professionals that strive to perform white hat Search Engine Optimisation and sticking to Google’s guidelines have often felt that their success is somewhat unfair. Sites with obvious black hat SEO often outranked their white hat competitors. To be fair, Google has improved this over the years. In the late 90s you could get away with basically anything. However, although the ethical route does pay off with hard work, even today certain black hat strategies still work.

Could it be that the game might finally change for good?

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team recently made the following statement:

“What about the people optimizing really hard and doing a lot of SEO. We don’t normally pre-announce changes but there is something we are working on in the last few months and hope to release it in the next months or few weeks. We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.“

A popular example of Google’s recent crackdown is the link network, buildmyrank.com. The site has openly admitted defeat and offered a refund to their customers after Google deindexed the majority of their network.

I am not sure if Google will phase everything in gradually. We have, however, seen some surprising results during the last month. One of our clients’ sites was competing with a website that was using obvious black hat SEO techniques. This site dropped out of the SERPs completely a few weeks ago. We have also seen quite a few dramatic positive shifts for our clients, possibly this is due to Google penalising all the black hat competitors and therefore shifting white hat sites up the rankings.

All this cracking down proves that you need to be very careful about anything you do. You might get penalised even if your intention was not to be black hat. Be sure to read up on Googles guidelines and remember that if you always strive to optimise for the user, you can feel safe. Google has sent a message to the webmaster tools interface of sites that violate their guidelines. If you find that a site you manage might possibly be one of these, take the steps to remove all suspicious SEO activity. Remove bad backlinks where possible, remove spammy content and meta data.

Can you even imagine a world without search? Imagine having to find information on the internet without using the help of Google, Yahoo or Bing. That would be a very difficult task indeed. How would you have found information? Would online advertisement have been as relevant to web users as it is today? Would websites have looked differently?

Let’s face it – search engines have become a fundamental part of life in the 21st century. It enables internet users to find information quickly just by typing a few relevant keywords/search phrases. In fact I think if search engines didn’t exist, the internet and the way information is found would have looked totally different today.

Web portals would have played a more significant role. It would have been the best source to find information about various topics. Using this way to obtain information or addresses to other web pages would have been very time consuming and frustrating to say the least. There would have been a lot more printed information than there are today and conventional libraries would have been used more to find information.

Online advertising would have been limited to advertising on portals or content websites and because it would have been categorized advertisement and not keyword specific advertisement it would not have been as relevant to users as it is on search engines today. This leads me to believe that it would have been a more difficult task to convert a visitor to your website in to a lead as your bounce rate would have been much higher as a result of less targeted traffic.

Search Engine Optimization would not have existed as the optimization of web pages wouldn’t have made a difference in how people find a website. Thus the general structure of a website might also have looked different than the current one. Web designers would also have had more freedom in designing graphic rich websites as the limitations set by robots would not have limited them.

I think it’s safe to say that life without search is virtually impossible to imagine and I think search will continue to evolve alongside the internet becoming more advanced as time ticks by.

Since yesterday you might have noticed the change of Google’s  search results page. They have changed the look and feel making it easier to find exactly what you are looking for and with additional tools to help enhance your search experience on Google.

What’s new?

They have added left-hand navigation navigation to the page, this gives you quick access to relevant options and tools.  Google will pick up that some content are more important than others, so with a click you can change the type of information you want, you wil easily be able to switch between news, images or video’s if you want to. The more relevant information will be shown first but you can always click on the more button to view other results.

You can customize your results and generate different views. you can view you examples on a timeline or restrict your results to the last 24 hours.

Other than the left-hand side changes they have updated the look and feel in terms of the colours and the logo. The new design streamlines the look, feel and functionality of Google making it easier to find what you are looking for.