How Google and Search Engines Work
A Brief History of Google
As the dominant search engine for business users, Google accounts for 90% of all search engine traffic worldwide (April 2018). And for the purpose of brevity, whenever I mention Google, I am also including Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
In the beginning of the transformation from broadcast marketing to search engine marketing was the rise of search engine optimization (SEO). SEO consulting services set themselves up to help technology companies get content in front of prospects.
The strategy was to use either white hat, grey hat, and/or black hat techniques to get a good position in the search engines for competitive keywords.
- White hat methods are playing the game according to Google’s publishing rules and guidelines.
- Grey hat techniques are borderline “gaming the system.”
- Black hat techniques are outright manipulation. Anyone detected using black hat techniques by Google is usually heavily penalized, if not outright banned for life.
As a result, your friendly SEO shop has become a content marketing agency in the last few years. Not to mention all the advertising agencies, website development studios, marketing communication companies, copyrighters, blogging experts, and lead-generation firms who offer the same.
That’s a tsunami of practitioners creating content and preaching the benefits of content marketing services.
The Google search algorithm, which is as long as your arm and uses artificial intelligence, has become more sophisticated. SEO techniques alone do not have the potency they once did because ultimately what gets a good search result on Google is what any search engine wants to deliver to its customers in the first place: good, relevant organic content from authoritative sources.
