It's not nice to fool MotherGoogle

In case you missed it, check out this Google Blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html

It announces a new feature called SearchWiki and if you are thinking about spending money on SEO, make sure you know what you are doing because you could be throwing your cash into a black hole.

Let's step back for a minute to understand what Google is trying to do in producing their search results. Basically it is all about relevance and nothing else. To the degree that you hear an SEO consultant talk about back links, meta tags, formatting and any other gimmicks to achieve high ranking on Google, watch out. Google is trying to keep one step ahead of these tricks to make sure the search produces the most relevant results. And now with SearchWiki they are enlisting the help of users who can kill your listing or trash it. At this point, this only affects your searches although others can see your ratings. But...the writing is on the wall...I expect Google will make use this in a much more active way in the future. For example, it may allow searchers to rank results based on how others have ranked sites. So despite your best efforts to "trick" Google into a high ranking, if your site is rated low by users your rank could be set back many pages into a trivial position.

So, the future is here and the answer is to work hard at making your content relevant, unique and well organized. And stop trying to fool MotherGoogle.