Is there anything Google likes?

I recently read a blog post about a site owner who did a little SEO experiment. He had heard that putting your keyword in the first position in your title tags was good for ranking results. So, on a site he owned that consisted of product pages, with categories and product names, he switched the order of the tags from "site name, keyword" and "category, keyword" to list keywords first. His results? Dropping in the SERPS by 10 positions for the category pages and 3 positions for the index page.

One commenter on this entry stated, "...This could make sense as (Google) penalizing SEO research activity."

I had to laugh! Now who knows if this is true of Google or not. Who knows if this "experiment" was even scientific enough to prove anything at all.

The point is this (and DO listen carefully!): Google hates you doing anything to try and rank better! If G had it's way, nobody would ever do anything at all to affect their site's ranking. Not ever. They would just love to be the sole deciding factor on how you do in the rankings.

But that's not how the world works, is it? :-) And is it any wonder that a lot of people will do whatever it takes to beat them? Hey, I used to be as white hat as they come. Guess who pushed me to the dark side? You guessed it. The big G.

But that's a story for another time.