Michael Martinez

The Official Web Site for Michael Martinez

Search Engine Optimization
Xenite.Org: Worlds of Imagination on the Web, founded by Michael Martinez in March, 1997.
SF-FANDOM: Where imagination leads the way, founded by Michael Martinez in February, 2001.


Michael Martinez
Search Engine Optimization

Ask any random person about "search engine optimization" and they may shrug their shoulders or shake their head. This small but growing field of technical services emerged in the mid- to late 1990s in response to growing demand from small businesses and Internet entrepreneurs for an effective approach to advertising Web sites through search engines.

Early search engines relied upon traditional information retrieval science principles to document and index the growing number of Web sites. It did not take long for Web site promoters and advertisers to see that they could manipulate the search results by including deceptive content on Web pages, using redirection, and trapping visitors on scurrilous Web pages.

In late 1998, Michael realized that, as popular as Xenite.Org had become, he was hopelessly outdated with respect to search placement. The search engines were tools that Michael used on a daily basis, but he didn't understand why his pages seldom showed in the top results for searches that should have listed them. Even the relatively rare topics on Xenite for which there were few Web sites were hard to find. Part of the problem, of course, was that search technology was overwhelmed by the huge growth of the Web. But the search engines did not take it upon themselves to teach Webmasters how to organize their content for proper indexing.

Seeking help online, Michael found a popular Web design and promotion community where people shared ideas and techniques. Within a year, Michael had acquired the basic skills for search engine optimization -- the art or technique of designing or modifying Web pages so that they will place highly in search engines. A dispute with the forum operator, who felt that Michael's unbiased comments might threaten his contracts with some online businesses, led to Michael's retreat from the SEO community for a while. But in 2000 J.K. Bowman of Spider-Food persuaded Michael to join the Spider-Food's Search Engine Optimization Forums. Michael has been participating in Spider-Food's forums on and off ever since.

Michael has also been a long-time participant in the LED Digest, one of the Internet's largest communities of advertisers, business operators, and Web design and promotion professionals. Originally the community discussion list for the banner exchange network that was acquired by Microsoft, the LED Digest has since moved on and established a track record for being a widely read resource. Many SEOs participate in the LED Digest.

Michael has participated in other forums, such as Jill Whelan's HighRankings, ThreadWatch, and SEOMoz (to name just a few). He publishes his most experimental work on Spider-Food, providing the forum's membership a rare and unique look into the thoughts and techniques of one of the Internet's most visible "algorithm chasers", or reverse-engineer. As an algorithm researcher, Michael examines the patterns of behavior in the search engines.

"Most SEOs don't chase the algorithms," Michael says. "They follow a few standard practices that have been documented and proven to work to some extent. But they miss out on the first-line research, which can take years to filter out to the public SEO community."

Michael's research and opinions are often contradictory to conventional SEO principles. Why is that? "What works today won't work as well tomorrow," Michael says. "All the standard pieces in today's SEO tool-kit -- reciprocal linkage, link building campaigns, content-rich doorway pages/landing pages, and fundamental Web design techniques -- were evaluated and refined by me and other people years ago. The linking relationships are not nearly as critical as most SEOs now believe. But because they rarely put their own sites or client sites at risk through experimentation, they don't see how the search engines have changed their algorithms."

Chasing algorithms is a perilous business. Experimental sites may never appear in the search results, or they may be deemed "spam" by the search engines -- unacceptable. "There was a time when entire domains might be banned because of a few pages," Michael notes. "That is rarely true any more. If you have thousands of pages of clean content, the search engines will tolerate some questionable content, especially if it's temporary."

So, does Xenite.Org sport secret SEO lab pages that may contain questionable content? "There are some pages that have been partially filtered out," Michael says. "These are older forwarding pages put in place to redirect visitors being sent to old forum locations by dead links on other sites. I had to create those pages years ago because we were losing a lot of visitors. The search engines should not be indexing those pages, but they still do because of the inbound linkage."

In fact, most experimental content, Michael says, doesn't have to be "sneaky" or "spammy". "Spammers produce high-volume autogenerated fluff. They aren't interested in quality, but rather quantity. However, quality doesn't always rise to the top as it should. So my work focuses on how to help real content stand out from the crowd."

The challenge isn't always easy. In late 2003 or early 2004, Google -- inarguably the currently most popular search engine -- put into place one or more filters that caused new domains to remain buried in search results for months. SEOs dubbed the effect "The Sandbox", and this domain -- michael-martinez.com -- was sandboxed for at least six months. "Current opinion holds that the Sandbox is the result of an aging delay," Michael says. "My feeling is that it may be tied to a crawl relationship between Web sites. Some sites come out of the sandbox very quickly. While it is possible that Google hand-promotes some sites, I think they have an algorithm for determining how often their spiders reach a new site through natural, trusted link sources. When you cross a threshold, you get out of the Sandbox. Otherwise, you have to wait until you score enough crawl points from other sources."

Is there any way to verify that guess? "No. But algorithm chasing is about staying on the cutting edge, not about writing the textbooks."

What does it take to be a search engine optimization specialist? "There are no standards in the industry," Michael says. "Many people simply create a Web site and start advertising their services. When they run into a problem, they hit the SEO forums and ask for help, hoping someone will help them solve it. The older SEOs, the people who generally know what they are doing, were once in that position, so many of us do try to help the newer people. But if business people wonder whether their money is well-spent, you have to wonder, too. After all, I could easily outrank a lot of these people I've been helping. You cannot learn proper SEO from a book. You learn by doing, by making mistakes, and the business community is paying people to learn from their mistakes."
Check out Michael's SEO Consulting Web site for more information. Michael is currently employed as Director of Search Strategies by an Internet Marketing firm.
Michael Martinez is the founder of Xenite.Org and the author of Visualizing Middle-earth, Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, and Understanding Middle-earth Michael Martinez


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The very contentious SEO community divides itself into White Hats (people who try not to break the search engines' rules for good Web design) and Black Hats (people who don't care about the rules). The iconography is inspired by traditional western movies, where the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black hats.

There are no clearly drawn lines, however. Some White Hat SEOs advocate techniques developed by the Black Hats. "Take link farms, for example," Michael says. "They were developed solely for the benefit of promoting Web sites to the top of search results."

A link farm is a group of Web sites that exchange links with each other for the purpose of boosting their link popularity. The practice was developed to manipulate results in Inktomi and Altavista, but when Google became popular the link farmers found that it worked especially well there, too.

Reciprocal link management software and management companies eventually became popular with Webmasters. While management tools and software are generally regarded with mistrust by the search engines, the link manager specialists claim they provide legitimate services to their clients.

Other techniques employed by White Hats, such as "landing pages", evolved from traditional doorway pages. "A doorway page," Michael says, "just includes a few selected 'keywords', maybe some gibberish to make it look like an article to an search engine, and a link to the true promotional page."

A content-rich doorway uses concise human-readable text to entice visitors to click deeper into the site. "Webzines now break up articles over multiple pages," Michael points out. "They generate content-rich doorways all the time, and we read them."




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