Limitations of Search Engines
Great Expectations
Search engine optimisation features, such as those mentioned on our SEO page, will help to get your website noticed, but they won’t work miracles. People with a website to advertise tend to expect too much of search engines, either through underestimating the sheer number of websites that touch on a particular topic, or through overestimating the abilities of the search engines.
They also overestimate the ability of internet users to make the most of what the search engines offer. Few users delve beyond the first couple of pages of search results, and fewer still read the search engines’ guidelines to efficient searching (see our How to Use Search Engines page for a quick lesson).
You should be aware that merely submitting a website to a search engine does not guarantee that the search engine will include that website in its search results. Different search engines work in different ways, with varying levels of efficiency. They also work at different speeds: some become aware of new websites almost instantly, while others may take weeks.
Ratings
Search engines, imperfect though they are, attempt to rank websites mainly according to two factors:
- relevance, which can be increased by skilled search engine optimisation,
- and popularity, which is largely out of the hands of the website’s owner and its designer.
Most search engines place great emphasis on the number of significant links to particular websites, and are able to detect the approximate number and quality of these links. The greater the number of relevant links, the more significant the website will appear to be.
Obviously, the number of links to your website will be largely out of your control, but there are legitimate ways to increase the number. Co–operation between websites that deal with a particular topic, in which each website includes links to the others, is one way of increasing your profile with the search engines.
As well as including the optimisation features mentioned above within your website and submitting the website to search engines, Lab 99 will of course be happy to include a page of links, if desired.
The sad truth is that most new websites start near the bottom of most search engines’ rankings and work their way up over time. You should be very wary of organisations claiming to guarantee that your website will instantly appear near the top of the rankings. There are many underhand ways of achieving this, and the search engines are wise to most of them. It is quite possible that your website will indeed appear near the top of the rankings, but it won’t stay there for long if the wrong methods are used. Once the search engines identify fraud, they will penalise your website, and perhaps even blacklist it.