Wall says big brands with big budgets “have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains.” They have a tremendous amount of authority, and can set subdomains to leverage that authority, linking to the sites they want to rank higher.

What may be more ethically questionable than that is that these big brands are buying up the other sites they want to rank higher. The end result of that is they are manipulating the search results so that only sites they own with positive messages about their brands show up.

Add that budget leverage to an innate ability to outbid smaller competitors on highly competitive keywords, and you have SERPs literally owned by big business.

Anyone surprised? It was bound to happen. Google has created a playing field that not only makes this type of corporate gaming possible, but encourages it. When you build a system based on popularity and relevance, companies will come out of the woodwork to prove that they have it.

Despite this type of corporate gaming, however, small companies can still rank highly for their important keywords. It’s called the long tail in some circles, but the idea is to take a less-than-popular keyword and create a niche around it. By “less-than-popular” I mean a keyword that is not the most searched for in its realm, but is searched for often enough that it deserves attention. Examples abound.

Here’s one example: In January 2007, searchers conducted 21,184 searches for the keyword “ranch.” There are more than 54 million results in Google for that keyword. If you want to build a website around the keyword “ranch,” let’s say that you own a ranch and you want to promote it through the search engines, then you need to beat out 54 million websites to get to the first page for that search term. That will be quite a challenge.

But let’s look at at a few other terms - there were 13,221 queries for “dude ranch” during the same period, 7,348 searches for “horse ranch,” 7,101 searches for “king ranch,” 6,831 queries for “cattle ranch,” 6,478 for “canyon ranch,” 6,159 for “ranches for sale,” 3,331 for “ranch house.” You get the idea.

Google shows 896,000 results for the term “ranch house” in quotation marks and 5.9 million without the quotes. Your chances of ranking well for “ranch house” are considerably greater than for “ranch” alone. This is the long tail. When you build a website around a particular niche that is smaller in scale than the broader category but still popular enough that you can capitalize on it then you stand a better chance of being successful online. This is how small businesses still have a leg up on the Internet.

But if current trends continue, then mega corporations could buy up all the best keywords. Never fear, though. The search engines are playing around with other strategies that could kill that concept for the big guys. One such method is latent semantic search. Another one is personalization. With any luck, these will be the wave of the future and the small guys will still have a fighting chance online. Meanwhile, do the proper keyword research and you should do fine.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Keyword Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.