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TO GEEKS WHO have watched Matt Cutts’s 450 YouTube videos (7 million views to date), he is a bit of a star. His job, as head of Google’s web spam team, is to ensure the search engine generates the most relevant results, keeping out sites whose content do not match but still appear at the top of Google searches. And in January he was in India, which is drawing his attention.

That could mean an end to small Indian agencies engaged in search engine optimisation (SEO) using ‘black hat’ methods (see sidebar on page 54). These are practices that violate Google’s guidelines for optimisation. SEO practices are classified as white hat or black hat, depending on which side of Google’s line they fall on.

A number of SEO freelancers and small agencies are located in tier II towns. These outfits have slick websites but are often difficult to locate by their postal addresses. (We spent two hours lost in a maze of small streets in Faridabad, but couldn’t locate any of the SEO companies apparently situated there.) Those that we found in Delhi were confined to a room with little more than a couple of computers and an Internet connection. But that’s all that they need.

“The small players work on tight budgets and tighter performance evaluation criteria. They are the ones who often resort to black hat techniques,” says Rahul Marwaha, vice president at Interactive Avenues, a digital advertising firm. But Google is closing in on them. Cutts’s team develops software that keeps SEO in check; Google’s Hyderabad office has a team that works closely with Cutts on ensuring search quality. He refuses to reveal the size of the team but says it’s growing fast.

“I understand the temptation but people who resort to black hat practices often end up digging themselves into an even deeper hole,” says Cutts, “because once they start doing it, they can’t stop and have to keep on doing it to keep the results high and evade policing.”

Big digital marketing agencies claim that Cutts and his team want to target agencies working for foreign clients rather than Indians. Marwaha attributes this to the fact that between 65% and 70% of all SEO work in India comprises outsourced projects by small global firms (who may not be well educated about the black hat-white hat divide) because of the low costs here; SEO packages can cost anything from Rs 25,000 for a one-time project to Rs 75,000 for a six-month assignment.

Technology research firm Forrester estimates that $21 billion (Rs 1.06 lakh crore) will be spent globally this year on search marketing, including SEO.

Narender Singh, founder of Profit By Clix, an Internet marketing company, says local clients have become more aware over the years and insist that only white hat techniques be used.

Google has been known to exclude companies from search results, the most prominent example being the 2006 barring of Bmw.de, the German carmaker BMW’s website, for alleged black hat practices. (The company increased its chances of top results in searches through keyword stuffing.)

According to Forrester, searches are the most important source of web traffic, with 50% of users relying on search to find websites in 2011. Google, which made an estimated 90% of its $37 billion revenue last year from its core product, searches, is obsessed with the accuracy of its results. It realises that the delight of discovering the web with inputs from friends on Facebook is posing a challenge. Apple with its voice assistant app Siri, which is capable of generating answers to queries, has also caused a flutter at Googleplex because it could signal the future of search. Which explains why last year Google adapted its algorithm (Google Panda) to look at the quality of content on
various websites and rank them accordingly.

The multilingual team in Hyderabad is part of this effort to separate the chaff, combining an intensive manual process with software prowess. For Matt Cutts and Google, the search is on.