Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have built a company with an extremely strong, distinctive corporate culture.

The command "Do no evil" is the best known part of a rich and complex set of attitudes that permeates everything that happens at Google, including it's response to search engine optimisation.

"The perfect search engine," says Larry Page, quoted on Google, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want."

The highest ranking sites will be those that offer the greatest intrinsic value to users.

You'll notice "would". Google is not the perfect search engine. It uses a variety of techniques to judge which sites are nearest to what you seem to be looking for, but the process is imprecise. It relies on algorithms that assess (guess at) or indicate likely value and relevance.

SEO and the space between reality and perfection

Smart SEO operators can play in the space between reality and perfection to get a site a better ranking than its intrinsic value might indicate. To some extent, an average site with excellent SEO can outrank a site with much higher intrinsic value but no SEO work done.

Some of SEO is about helping the tools do their job. For example, page titles and metatags held bots search a site. Page optimisation improves delivery on what the metatags promise. But somewhere past there is work that aims to optimise the search engine findings regardless of intrinsic value.

Some of this is regarded by Google as OK, some of it is a grey area and some of it is clearly "black hat".

Google's response

Is Google aware of this? You bet. And they hate it. They go to a lot of trouble to thwart it.

For example, the algorithms Google uses to rate a site are a closely guarded secret. They assess over 200 factors. They are changed regularly, perhaps every three months, for the sole purpose of disrupting whatever advantage-gaining techniques SEO practitioners have learned.

That's why SEO has to be continuous, why rankings can be lost in a flash.

Under the guise of "Do no evil" Google will even tell white lies; for example, announcing that link farming will now get you automatically black listed. Doubtless the Google boys wish this was true, but the reality is that low level, careful linking farming will work and only high level, blatant abuse is currently detected and acted on.

So much for the short term. In the longer term, Google are working constantly to improve their search methodology to stamp out SEO tricks. For example, key-word stacking with irrelevant (but powerful) search terms was once an effective trick, now it will get you black listed.

Google's path into the future however we think is going to be page rank. Page rank is a statistic devised (and patented) by Google, calculated via a complex and very secret algorithm. It's mostly about intrinsic value as determined by users (not algorithms).

Google is paying a lot of attention to page rank. Despite this, page rank is not currently very important to search ranking. If you have a page rank of 0 (usually a black list) or 1 or 2, you have a problem, but a 4 or 5 out of 9 will do fine.

Google says page rank will become more effective as the web grows.

They say page rank is the most important measure because it reflects the response of other web users to a website, rather than the skill of its SEO consultants.

We think that ultimately Google will be proven right. Google is powerful enough to reshape the web according to how they think it should be, and when they have users on side they are invincible.

What this means for you now

Currently, there is a role for SEO and Google facilitates that role with a lot of information.

To get a decent return on your web investment, you need SEO now.

But you should also be keeping an eye to the future, when the sleight of hand SEO will fall away to leave only the intrinsic value of your site to users.

So even in your current SEO you should concentrate most on increasing the value of your site to visitors by providing more an better information, making that information easier and faster to access and linking with other sites who deliver the same values.

That's the basis of the SEO contracts Glide offers: immediate SEO results, long term intrinsic value building.