if you lie God will punish you

Twelve years ago I did some school English teaching part of coop training. I saw a ten years old kid showed a frowning face after his teacher lied to him about his reading. The kid finished reading then teacher told him “thats great” the kid smiled and joy glowed in his eyes; He continued reading, teacher stopped him and said ” I wasn’t serious about that, you are horrible and that shows you weren’t following up attentively”.

Now this has to do with the fact that this feeling is same for many people like me and you when searching for something online. first you feel happy that you found it, then website reality disappoints you.

Search engine shows the results and the most relevant or most of the times one of the first page results gets clicked. If your website has the same exact info and topic shown in the SERP (search engine results page) then bingo. Big smile and maybe like, share, download, subscribe or add to favorites. If the website has something totally different than the result shown on the SERP or worse if it is irrelevant, then disaster. Instant exit, (what is famously known as bounce). Big disappointment and crumbling face moment for the searcher.

The consequences are massive and they will impact the credibility of the your website for search engines, and most importantly people. How can that happen?

It happens in different ways ; first google latest penguin, panda and other updates enhanced the algorithms to empower people not websites/brands. So it hits your website credibility, as It calculates what people (visitors) like and what they don’t after they conduct search. Second, the action of bounce that the searcher does after realizing irrelevant content on your website is traced by the search engine, and that adds up to the search ranking of your website. After some time and several incidents of bouncing visitors, google will automatically de-rank your website . So if it used to appear in the first page it will go the the second and so on. Third, if the result was shown as an advertisement in search, what is known as search engine marketing.

For example, Faisal is searching for “red tall boot ” and your website is buying such keywords as part of the search engine marketing plans, and google showed your website in the first page as an advertisement, then Faisal clicked on your advertised link, but the content on your website is irrelevant then this is bad again.

What will happen is that google will calculate one more bounce to your website behavior records, and the biding on the keyword will be higher and higher. This means more advertising budget burned with negative business impact.

So you lied to Faisal then google punished you by
1- degrading your website credibility
2- de-ranking among search results, then less visitors.
3- higher keywords bids, which means advertising budget burn.
4-worst Faisal now hates your website.

Think of the opposite if you were telling the truth and smartly having relevant content and ideas in your website to Faisal and others. (Visitors).