Provide a Value-Added Service to Appease the Google Gods

by Trey Pennewell

Published on this site: December 16th, 2005 - See more articles from this month

Every once in a while I stumble across some very interesting information. This happened to me this week and I thought that I would share with you what I have found. If you are interested in improving your google search engine rankings and your page rank you must make sure that you are doing exactly what Google wants you to do. As you probably know already, Google is the largest search engine on the Internet. To receive a high ranking from Google means that you will generate huge amounts of traffic to your website. People are always searching for ways to improve their search engine rankings and ways to appease the Google Gods.

One of the primary things that Google and its algorithms look at is whether or not you are providing a "value-added service". Now that we know this we need to figure out exactly what Google means by the term "value-added service". A value-added service is one that can stand on its own merits. By this I mean that the website is not simply a redirecting website. The website contains information that offers value to the reader. Many people use websites that are what Google refers to as a "sneaky redirect". That means that when a user goes to that site, he or she is simply sent elsewhere. A sneaky redirect is not a value-added service by Google standards. In fact, if you operated websites that are simply redirecting people to other sites, Google will actually deem your site as being "offensive".

Another way to determine if you are offering a value-added service according to Google is to ask yourself "Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate were taken away?" This of course applies to those of you who are trying to generate revenue from sources such as Adsense, Overture, or similar affiliate linking programs. If Google decides that your website would not remain as a coherent whole, your site will again be deemed as "offensive". Google does not like for a website to be set up solely for the purpose of generating affiliate links. It is however ok to have affiliate links as long as the site offers something to the reader other than affiliates links. This is where unique content comes into play. Having unique content on your site that offers the reader
some type of information, entertainment, etc. will help your website to remain a coherent whole after the affiliate links are removed. Google wants to differentiate between whether or not the affiliate linking is "central or incidental" to the sites
existence. If it is central, then you are in trouble, if it is incidental then you should be fine according to Google.

This is where the concept of a value-added service comes in again. Your website needs to be able to stand on its own two feet so to speak. Your website needs to offer something that other websites do not. Whether it is unique content, a specialized product, or a specialized service, your site needs to be able to stand alone without links.

There are many other things that Google will penalize websites for. One of these is irrelevant repetitive text. This used to work in the past, but Google and the other major search engines have come up with algorithms to deal with this. If you remember, a few years ago webmasters would simply put in keywords at the
bottom of their web page over and over again. They would put in all the variations of the keywords in an attempt to get more hits. There would literally be hundreds of thousands of these keywords listed at the bottom of the web page, so that no matter what a person was searching for on the Internet they could get directed to these pages. This no longer works. Nowadays people are writing keyword-optimized articles and adhering to certain keyword densities in the articles, so that they do not get in trouble with the search engines.

Another issue that Google looks at when determining whether or not you are providing a value-added service is that your website has been designed for the users, not the search engines. This means that your website does not employ what Google calls "cloaking" techniques. Google defines cloaking as deceiving
users by presenting different content to search engines than what you present to users. This will automatically result in an "offensive" designation from Google.

These are just some of the basic guidelines set forth by the Google Gods. You can read more about these guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Always remember that creating unique content for your website is one of the best ways to be deemed as providing a value-added service by Google. I encourage
you to read the information at the above link and to educate yourself so that you get the search engine results that you are looking to receive.

Trey Pennewell is a writer for http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com "Links and Traffic" is a value-added service designed to help generate, of course, "links and traffic" for their clients. Using high quality content as the foundation, LATC will create high quality links to your website, AND they will Guarantee Their Results.