Search engines want and need your content
June 6th, 2008One thing search engine marketers might lead you to believe is that the big search engines want to make it difficult for you to get your content indexed. The common wisdom seems to be that online publishers need to do everything just right or the search engines will reject the publishers’ pages. Even worse, some marketers tell you if the search engines think your site is ‘gaming’ their listings, they’ll ban you for life (or something similarly terrible).
The thing is, I just don’t buy into this line of reasoning. The fact is, search engines like Google NEED publishers’ content to keep their search engine results relevant. Google probably won’t start rejecting content from CNN.com just because CNN decides to start stuffing their meta tags with bogus keywords - CNN still produces valuable content that answers online queries.
Even if your site isn’t as big or as well known as CNN, I’d argue that your content may be even more important to the search engines. Google and Yahoo! are useful tools for finding niche content that simply won’t be found by browsing CNN or Amazon. If search engines pick and choose which sites they list they are no longer complete resources - and hence, their value to users is diminished.
Still aren’t convinced that Google needs your content? Consider Google image search. Google has basically cached (that is, saved a copy to their own servers) photos from virtually every website on the internet and serves these images in response to user queries. Some companies aren’t too happy about the fact that Google is making money off their content (images and otherwise) and some publishers have even sued to block Google from accessing their content. Publishers blocking search engines? I thought it was the other way around 
Of course search engines do need to be on the lookout for sites that provide little value in response to search queries (i.e. spam sites that simply provide paid links to other sites with zero original content). These ’spammers’ are getting more and more sophisticated but rest assured: If your site contains original and useful content, you WILL receive fair placement in the major search engines. It may take time but don’t worry - the search engines want and need your content!
