"Google Dance"

No two thoughts about it: Google is smart!
Instead of running aways from their enemies, they try to work with them. Strange it may sound, but this what happened recently at Googleplex, where they had their annual summer bash called "Google Dance". Behind the scenes, it was actually rendezvous between cunning internet entrepreneurs who constantly try to manipulate Google's search engine results for a competitive edge with Google's top notch engineers.

For the millions of websites without a well-known domain name, 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 result is almost like gold.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.

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," 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.'"

Google knows it can't entirely avoid Black Hats, so its finding ways to subside their effect!

| Wired News