Understanding Search Engineers

Here is a crazy idea – the better you understand search engines the you better you will be able to interact with them. I am not talking about the mathematical algorithms of the search engines I am talking in more general terms. What does the company want? What are the employees trying to achieve? What is the motivation driving them?

Before we can get all freudian and psychoanalyze this lets get clear about some things:
-Search engines are made up of many, many teams.
-Each team has many, many individuals.
-Each person is an individual with their own personal ideas

Basically search engines are just like every other company and their employees are just like you and your coworkers. Ready for my incredible wisdom? Get ready to be shocked by my “Master of the Obvious” observations.

Search Engines Care About Profit
Every search engine cares about profit and they care alot about it. When I talk about profit I am talking about the search engines wanting to make enough money to pay for the employees big obscene raises instead of having layoffs. Ideally there is enough profit left over that the company’s stock price skyrockets making the employees even more rich throught the stock options most of them signed up for. Sure there are a few search engine employees that have made their millions and no longer care alot about money but they are the tiny minority and if you keep reading you’ll see why they still care about their search engine being very profitable.

Profits Come From Traffic
To make the mountains of profits, the search engines generally need mountains and mountains of traffic that they can monetize. This traffic helps the search engines be profitable everyday which they need since they have lots of employees and lots of computers they need to pay for. You cant even imagine how many hundreds of millions of dollars are needed to pay for their research and development. This is why the rich engineers who personally dont need more money care about profit – to pay for their research and other projects. For search engines to have mountains of traffic you need alot of happy customers that keep going back.

User Experience is Critical
If you want happy users to keep generating traffic on your search engine then you need to give users what they want. Imagine if people went to a search engine and searched for Disney and got porn. That search engine would have no repeat users & no traffic to monetize. Many search engine employees are incredibly sensitive to anything that potentially jeopardizes the user experience since that user experience is closely tied to profitability. Now imagine if instead of our Disney example the user searched for BMW and got an affiliate website that had no content. This experience would probably also upset the user and lead to a loss of traffic. Are you starting to understand why some search engine employees may ferociously hate low-value affiliate websites. This is also one reason why search engines have a different rule book for big brands – they need to ensure users can see the big brands that the user expects to find.

Endangering User Experience Aint Smart
Search engines recognize that the user experience leads to repeat traffic which leads to monetization which lead to profit which leads to raises. If you try to spam your way into the serps with a low value website then you are basically endangering the raises of the search engineers. Which is a very quick way to make enemies and to get your website killed. Some shortcuts make sense but trying to push low or no value websites is probably not a smart shortcut. The “churn and burn” spamming business model was great 5 years ago when the search engines were not as sophisticated. Now the search engines are much better identifying website quality signals which now take longer to generate and are much faster at burning websites that could endanger the search engine user experience. It is much smarter for your long term profit strategy to build a website with lots of quality content that the search engines will want to rank highly.

Basically What I’m Saying…
Yea I know I’m not Shakespeare and I thank you for lasting this long reading my drivel. I’m just trying to help explain why search engines do the things they do. The more that you can align your internet strategy with the search engines the easier it will be to achieve long term success. You can fight the search engines but why waste your limited resources? I would prefer to pick my battles and try to make my long term path as easy as possible.