Mountain View, Calif. – Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, but the real action was unfolding inside a sterile conference room at Google Inc.’s headquarters.
That’s where the cunning Internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google’s search-engine results for a competitive edge were trying to make the most of a rare opportunity to match wits face-to- face with the company’s top engineers.
Google’s code-talking experts, despite putting on a show of being helpful, weren’t about to reveal their “secret sauce” – Google’s tightly guarded formula for ranking websites.
But that didn’t zap the energy from the “Google Dance” – an annual summer party that’s become a metaphor for the behind- the-scenes twists and turns that can cause websites to rise and fall in Google’s search results.
For the millions of websites without a well-known domain name, those rankings can mean the difference between success or failure because Google’s search engine drives so much of the Internet’s traffic.
“Being on the first page of Google’s results is like gold,” said website consultant Gordon Liametz, one of the roughly 2,000 guests at this year’s party, held this month at Google’s colorful corporate campus.
The website administrators, known as webmasters, and their consultants paid particularly close attention to Google engineer Matt Cutts, the company’s main liaison with the webmaster community and this party’s star attraction.
“That’s the Mick Jagger of search!” exclaimed e-marketing strategist Seth Wilde as he strolled by Cutts and his audience of webmasters.
Cutts, who has worked at Google for five years, sees it differently.
“I feel more like the Rick Moranis of search because I end up dealing with so many quirky and weird cases,” he said.
With so much at stake, low- ranked websites spend much time and money trying to elevate their standing, even if they must resort to deception.
The tactics include “keyword stuffing” – peppering a Web page with phrases associated with a specific topic such as “laptop computers” in hopes of duping the software “spiders” that troll the Internet to feed Google’s growing search index.
It’s a risky strategy, because Google and other search engines penalize websites that get caught gratuitously repeating the same word. In the worst cases, the offending websites are deleted from the index so they don’t show up in search results at all.
Sometimes webmasters collude to populate their sites with a large number of incoming links from other sites. This approach makes a site appear more authoritative and popular than it really is and thus rise in rankings.
Such dirty tricks pollute the search results with websites that have little to do with a user’s request, frustrating consumers, diminishing Google’s credibility and threatening to undermine the company’s profits by driving users to its rivals.
Not surprisingly, Google works hard to thwart the mischief makers, sometimes branded as “Black Hats” because of their subterfuge.
Engineers frequently tweak the algorithms that determine the rankings, sometimes causing websites perched at the top to fall a few notches or, worse, even plunge to the back pages of the results.
Google’s reshuffling raised so many anxieties that webmasters in 2002 began to name the changes after hurricanes and infamous events.
One particularly unpopular change Google rolled out in 2003 was dubbed “Florida” after the muddled ballot count in the 2000 presidential election.
Hoping to ease the tensions with webmasters, Google hatched the idea of its “dance” party during an annual search- engine convention held in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from Google’s headquarters.
The company invited some of the Black Hats, effectively welcoming the foxes into the hen house.
“Google realized it was never going to get rid of these (Black Hats), so it decided it may as well work with them,” said Chris Winfield, a Google Dance party veteran who runs 10e20, a search engine marketing firm.
“Until then, it always seemed like it was us against them.”
Wilde, who works for Denver- based Web consultant Viewmark Inc., puts it more bluntly: “Google is smart. You always try to keep your enemies close to you.”
