Friday, April 20, 2007
Last 8th and 9th of March we went to the OJOBuscador conference in Madrid. The event was very interesting for us since we had the chance to listen to presentations from the main search engines and to discuss with the webmasters their main concerns regarding Spanish search engine positioning. One key point mentioned frequently both in the SEO sessions and in the informal chats was the disadvantage of working in an SEO market where several companies use sneaky methods that go against the official Webmaster Guidelines.
There are some techniques such as generating satellite domains or creating thousands of irrelevant pages with the sole purpose of gaining traffic in search queries that are not always related to sites' content. Another phenomenon we have observed is the steady influx of domains which only have content from affiliate sites without adding any unique value or relevance.
We are going to be stricter against the techniques previously discussed, as we consider it is very important to avoid deceiving the users. Nevertheless, we think the ultimate responsibility for the contents of a website belongs to the webmaster, who should watch over the site quality and verify that the pages are made for the user.
Aiming to enhance communication with the webmaster community, we would like to announce that going forward Google will participate and monitor the Spanish Webmaster Discussion Forum.