As all you folks out there already know, “Google”:http://www.google.com/ is _the_ mother of all search engines. Being at the top of the pack, though, is not without its pitfalls. Google is criticized for many things it does right and wrong in users’ eyes, and rightly so: Google has amassed so much of the search engine market share that they virtually manage access to huge chunks of data islands on the Internet. Certainly, one can know how to get to various website by surfing from site to site, but finding a particular nugget of information requires using Google to get at it. This is where their immense power lies, as they control how popular a site may be through their “PageRank”:http://www.google.com/technology/ technology that indexes pages by various criterion and ranks them according to various search terms.

These criterion are the keys. Knowing how important these keys are with respect to one another can result in a rising PageRank for any particular page. Enter the sleazy Search Engine Optimization companies. They claim to know what’s best for any page and use a number of techniques to help their clients achieve that coveted number one spot on Google (and the other search engines, too). But the only party that can truly understand the algorithm at work is Google themselves. Any attempt to know or claim to know is preposterous, as many in the blogosphere have pointed out in the past.

Still, there are some criterion that are made transparent as seen from one Google index update to the next. For example, Google recently updated their major index as analyzed using a slightly altered set of criterion, and “sensory output”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/ fell off the map when searching for “sensory output” (without quotes). Weird, huh? Now, I know that _sensory output_ is nothing special in and of itself as it signifies nothing in science or otherwise, and I liked the combination of words. These two words used to bring up this site at the top of Google, but no more, as it has been buried. Now, I ask (and will answer) why?

For some time, many have known that Google forbids certain sneaky tactics by SEO(Search Engine Optimization) companies to boost their customers’ ranks such as “cloaking”:http://www.answers.com/cloaking&r=67, “doorway pages”:http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=Doorway+page&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1, and “spamdexing”:http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=1512&dekey=spamdexing&gwp=8&curtab=1512_1. Now, I have never used such techniques and have relied on my web design and the good developers of “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ to create well-formed XHTML. The content is all original, so Google should have no problems with my site. Still, there was one thing I forgot to mention: when writing blog entries such as this one, I often use Google to locate pages to which I can link so that users have that information accessible. when I have done this in the past, though, I sometimes copy the link directly from the results page. That URL(Uniform Resource Locator) does not actually point to the link I wanted, but back to Google, who redirects the user to the actual link. I found about ten blog entries where I had mistakenly done this, and most of them were recent. I think Google did not like this because it could be seen as a way to boost my ratings by linking to their search result links. This is, though, just a guess.

If anyone has any particular insight into why I have been bumped off, please let me know in the comments. I’m not terribly offended by Google, just curious.