“Wait,” you might be asking, “What does Amazon.com have to do with third-party website hosting?” For those not in the industry, Amazon Web Services is the one truly exemplary implementation of the cloud I’ve seen. It’s a nearly infinite amount of disk space and bandwidth paid for on an on-demand basis. In short, Amazon.com built their own amazing internal infrastructure so well that they were able to productize it effectively. It’s a game-changing service.

One nice aspect of the modern era of web hosting for sites that get a lot of traffic is that I no longer have to spend time in data centers installing more RAM or moving servers around. To use AWS, I fire up a web browser. And possibly, but not necessarily, a shell.

Honestly, though, as cool as the cloud is from a resource management perspective, it isn’t appreciably different in terms of points of failure from traditional server environments. It might be someday, but right now it’s possible for lightning to strike and cause an outage. There’s still latency when traversing the full internet (say, from a data center in Northern Virginia to a data center in Palo Alto), which makes true geographically independent redundancy difficult.

Even Google occasionally experiences technical difficulty with products that spent 6 years in beta. Like Gmail. Even worse, data-eating software bugs do still get released into the wild.

So while you might not want to run your website and keep all of your email on your personal computer, having a good backup strategy is still a good idea. And if your business depends on your site being up, having a strategy for rapid mirroring from unhosted data (i.e., an ability to switch hosts completely if necessary, possibly from cold storage) is an even better idea.

For the moment, we’re still waiting to be able to discover great books again…

To my mind, if I’m focused on generating relevance and avoiding penalties for my customers, section 5.3 of Google’s TOS has relevance:

5.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) any of the Services through any automated means (including use of scripts or web crawlers) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Services.

And a statement in their webmaster guidelines confirms my right to be suspicious, especially on behalf of my paying customers:

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

So here’s a question: Is it possible to create a disclaimer or other indicator of certified white hat toolkits? Would it even matter without a more open review of toolkit source code? Should there be an independent SEO certification authority of some kind, and would SEOs even trust it? Or would Google (and other search engines) consent to creating a standard badge that a data (or other relevant) license of some kind exists between the two parties?

To other people in this space: Does it matter at all to you whether services, many of which are probably charging you money, are operating legally? Do you have some mechanism I’m missing for identifying toolkits that are thoroughly white hat?

Consequentially, I wonder what the ramifications are for the companies that are building black hat toolkits. With the rise of cloud computing (e.g., Amazon EC2) and IPv6 (and, thus, essentially unlimited/untraceable IPs), can Google and the other major search engines even identify SERP scrapers and the like?

I’ve heard tell (can’t find a quotation at the moment) that Matt Cutts is dismissive of scrapers as any sort of threat to Google (presumably in the context of bandwidth as the scrapers hit their servers), but I don’t know whether that means there is any kind of internal effort to track SERP scrapers. I’m personally more interested in whether they could wind up creating a cascading penalty if it were determined that SEOs were using a toolkit that was in flagrant violation of TOS, such that sites being tracked by an SEO wound up suffering.

A bigger social question: Does the ease with which TOSes and copyrights can be violated online make us all likelier to be criminals? Or is it justified as online civil disobedience?

Now, SEO is only one part of the SearchViz approach to getting found through inbound marketing, but it’s an important one. In a recent video in the excellent Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel, Matt answers the question of how he would run his own online marketing company. While he doesn’t give the million dollar secret to SEO success, he suggests that reputation and transparency are reasonable hypothetical foundations for good services. And that’s something we generally strive for at SearchViz. We’re not in the habit of doing things we’re uncomfortable telling our customers about, just as we’re not in the habit of doing things where we have to explain to the customer, “Look, we did this special for you, but it’s… unconventional. So we wanted to let you know this is how we did it, but don’t tell anyone, okay?” In short, when it comes to SEO, we’re not trying to game the system; we’re trying to ensure demonstration of relevance.

If some SEOs seem to wear black hats or practice dark arts, it’s likely because search is a black box. The proprietary algorithms used by the major search engines are one of the primary domains of market competition. If Google itself were a truly open system, it would be possible to tailor sites exactly to the algorithm, regardless of actual relevance. Viagra spammers could likely adapt to an open algorithm to ensure that they did well in queries for [art museum]. An interesting question is whether an open search algorithm would increase or decrease relevance in search results. To my knowledge, no one has attempted to create an open search algorithm that has achieved any sort of liquidity. So because search is currently proprietary, SEO research and development frequently yields short-term tactical advantages for those quickest to market with reverse engineered discoveries about the algorithms employed by the search engines. As these tactics become disseminated, their value decreases. With standard search engine results pages (SERPs) containing 10 results for most search engines, each keyword or search phrase has a supply/demand problem based on relevance.

We’re not really interested in the black box churn. To us, SEO is akin to an ideology, but it’s one that is evidence-based while still taking a long view. Here at SearchViz, our strategy is relevance, and our tactics include mostly widely known best practices designed to highlight relevance for the search engines. We’re not going to charge you to stuff a bunch of useless paid directories with your site, and we’re not going to promote articles about your site to sites you’ve never heard of unless they’re high-quality sources of information relevant to your site. What we will do is ensure that you have quality semantic structure that matches your content and markup that matches the recommendations of the search engines. We will make sure that you’re in quality directories and have quality inbound links that reflect the best relationships you already enjoy but might not be fully leveraging. We will keep up with the practices recommended by search engines and leveraged by SEOs to ensure that you are exposing your relevance.

The simple truth is that there remain a number of sites on the Web that, largely because of an unfortunate legacy of Web standards existing prior to standard tools for creating documents, are non-optimal for the search experience. Imagine if copywriters could create Word documents without using Microsoft Word akin to the way web designers hand-rolled their own HTML with no validity checking built in. Basic documents would have been nearly impossible to read or to transfer between computers. Try asking a web designer sometime, for instance, about designing for IE6. With Word, there are very few compatibility issues between versions or across platforms. With the Web, there are countless rendering issues across browsers and platforms. In some ways, our role is to improve the Web by returning to standards and exposing relevance.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be partnering with someone willing to put on the black hat at least occasionally?” You can if you want, but that’s one of many reasons why SEO isn’t the only part of our strategy. Remember: We’re an inbound marketing agency. This means we use a variety of tactics to help you get found. As long as you’re creating quality original content, you will be relevant to search, in social media, in email, and wherever else you’re likely to engage your audience. In the long run, we think this strategy yields more value to our customers than Googlebombing ever could.

If you’re concerned that your site might not be letting search engines know just how relevant it is, please contact us.