The Anti-Thesaurus: Unwords For Web Searches

Nicholas Carroll writes: "In the continual struggle between search engine administrators, index spammers, and the chaos that underlies knowledge classification, we have endless tools for 'increasing relevance' of search returns, ranging from much ballyhooed and misunderstood 'meta keywords,' to complex algorithms that are still far from perfecting artificial intelligence. Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases."

Comments

You know this is going to happen

[Satai]

I can see it now. To Do lists are being written up as we speak...

1. Increase relevance for Penis Enlargement.
2. Decrease relevance for Bullshit.

Bad planning

[ahoehn]

Not such a bright idea to whine about too much traffic on your website and then get a link to your site from a slashdot article.

That's not going to help bandwidth

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

If you replace <meta="keywords" content="mickey mouse"> by <meta="nonwords" content="bestiality mouse-fucking zoophilia kinky ....>, you might draw more Disney lovers and less perverts to your site, but I suspect your HTML file will grow quite a lot bigger ...

Re:How about this?

[H310iSe]

from webmonkey on search engine foolin' software:

You can guess why: Search engine developers buy copies of the same software, learn how to recognize its output, and then demote your site or block it altogether when they spot that pattern in your pages.

no hard "this site was banned" but it seems there are some who do demote/block if they catch you putting garbage in your keyword list.

PS if any porn site puts 'alan turing' in their keywords I would actually want to go there - shows some imagination to say the least, gotta give them props for that...

Re:Sounds Good

[pen]

my site gets at least 50 hits a month from searches for "swedish porn". also, "amputated penis", "charcoal underwear", and "president bush daughter".

A part they left out of the story;

[vectus]

Webmasters, however, should be careful with these new "anti-words", as when they mix with their word counterpart, a gigantic explosion results.

Could have done with this years ago

[Curl E]

A long time ago (in a galaxy far away) I kept a playlist of my radio show. I had one page per month. One month I played Prono For Pyros "Pets" twice. Guess which web page in our department had the highest hit count for the next year...