At the end of each year we get together with a group of friends and over a course of several nights have a come dine with me competition. For those of you who are not familiar with Come Dine With Me, this is where we take it in turns to cook for the other guests each night and the performance gets marked. After all, contestants have cooked the scores are counted and a winner is crowned.
We do this every year and have noticed how closely the world of SEO mimics the real world. The example of this is that in the first year when the competition was new one of the competitors decided to be “creative” with a scoring. Thinking that by scoring everybody with zero this would give them a better chance of winning the competition. This might sound a little bit underhand and yes I did feel a bit guilty at the time. However, we did have some great results and we won the inaugural competition. We walked away with the gold rolling pin trophy proud as punch. Not to mention some of the other competitors were a little bit upset with this (and boy do they go on about it year after year) and so as a penalty we were unmarked rather harshly the following year and came last.
You may equate this to the early days of SEO when people may have embedded their web pages with keywords to try and trick the search engine algorithms. They might have filled the pages with so many keywords that some of them were printed on white text with a white background to hide them from invisibly recognised. Other methods were that the site would have a page for 10 different locations with the same content except for the name of the town they were targeting. This worked well for a time and like ourselves with a come dine with me trophy, great results at the top of the rankings. However, just like our annual competition the people got a bit upset and thought that this was unfair and they have quality work into their websites. So Google quickly learned this and set building computer program known as the algorithm with a nickname “Panda” and closely followed by another called “Penguin”. These are here to make sure that the quality sites will be praised and sites that try and trick the results will be penalised.
So after learning a lesson we returned to the competition with our tail between our legs, however after some time and a lot of hard work eventually came back and regained the trophy. Resting on our laurels and subsequent years meal was not up to standard as the year before and hence dropped down the rankings again. Whereas other couples in the come dine with me competition were consistently putting full day’s effort to create a superb meal are always in the top two.
So just like the world of SEO, it goes to show that you can only choose a system for very short time for being caught out and penalised heavily and that people that perform consistently best over a long period of time for those that we are sitting and produce high-quality work.
That said you can always ply your guests with alcohol in hope for a good score or if you are in business for your website to provide them with some goodies such as tips and tricks to help them with their business.
