Google is like an elephant, it has long memory. Old black hat search engine marketing sins may come back and haunt you.

Stephen Mahaney of Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News newsletter (subscription required) makes some interesting points in the article: “Ten Years of Search Engine News and The Search Revolution!”

The sophistication level of search technology will grow exponentially, he argues.

Search engines like Google will develop intuitive and memory skills that will make them look almost super-human:

“You probably already know that engines are striving to deliver results based on your prior searches. But what a lot of people are missing is that search engines are building a database of every website’s, every company’s and every SEO’s optimization efforts.

As we speak, Google is building a very large rat trap and temporarily nourishing all of the rats who are eating the bait-cheese. Google wants you to join the various linking, advertising, and article-content networks so they can identify all the rat-trails and trap the rodents en masse.”

Google may use historical data

His point is that Google keeps copies of its own search index. If it grows suspicious of your search engine optimization techniques, it may go back into its archives and see what your site (or even you as a registered web site owner) did years ago. If your combined practices of yesterday and today clearly identifies you as a black hat spammer, you are dead, Mahaney argues:

“Never again will anything affiliated with you, your company, or your website be able to rank well again.”

Stick to white hat search engine marketing techniques

Mahaney concludes therefore that you have to balance logic, common sense, foresight and ethics when you make your search engine marketing decisions: “Bottom line: Stick within the boundaries of SEO that Google recommends.”

We certainly agree with his conclusion. You should never gamble with your site’s search engine reputation, unless you can afford to loose all that Google traffic. But is it likely that Google will punish people in perpetuity if they find them to be hard core spammers?

Google, forgive me!

Well, yes, probably. Today Google will forgive repenting sinners if they clean up their act. Google’s main objective is to keep as many high quality sites in the index as possible, and if the website in question removes all the black hat tricks.

Google will often re-include such pages in the index and remove any ranking penalty that might exist. There is no reason to believe that this will not be the case in the future as well.

However, hard core spammers, i.e. webmasters that continuously continue to break Google’s own webmaster guidelines, may certainly find themselves out in the cold.

The need for up to date search engine marketing intelligence

The sad thing about this is that such a new tactic from Google’s side will not harm the professional search engine spammers. They have ways of hiding their identity, and will always have a large number of separate web site rings running. If one such group of sites is taken down, they have others to take up the slack.

No, the people that will suffer are amateurs that have read some half digested “search engine optimization advice” from the late nineties, and who are not up to date with the latest developments in search engine spam tracking (i.e. they are not reading Pandia, Planet Ocean or any other front line publication). They will continue to search for short cuts, getting burned every time.

Another group that will suffer are firms that hire dodgy search engine marketing companies. The SEM company will move on, leaving a site full of hidden text, unsanitary doorway pages, and cloaked redirects behind. When Google detects this pattern, they will pull the plug, and a company that relies on search engine traffic will go bust.

A rat-trap?

As for Google consciously wanting you to go into their “rat trap”, we are more doubtful. It seems to us that Google is constantly warning webmasters against linking, advertising, and article-content networks (see for example Google’s Matt Cutts). However, that Google can use link-farms etc. to identify spammers is clearly the case.