Modern Day Search Engine Manipulations

An anonymous reader writes "I fondly recall the days of yore when search engines could be manipulated just by sticking thousands of extraneous filler words in the META tags or hidden at the bottom of the page. Nowadays search engines work by more advanced techniques that generally don't fall prey to these simplistic tactics, but it'd be folly to presume them impervious. Does it still happen?"

Comments

old news

[blablablastuff]

There have been many articles all over the place about people spoofing google by making tons of pages that link back to the real page they want to boost

Re:old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...what's your point (apart from "give me FP!")? We should just accept it as the status quo and move on?

Re:old news

[tq_at_sju]

but did those many articles claiming that they put tons of links on their pages to boost up their search results contain many articles with many links to boost their articles links ?
hehe

Re:old news

[paladin_tom]

You can get the same effect by posting links to your site on message boards.

In my school's web tech class, we had a competition to make "zxylition" pages (zxylition is a made-up word) and get them listed on Google. The first page up used this technique to get noticed by Google.

of course.

[garcia]

Remember, search engines now ask for money and they will make sure your page gets to the top of the list.

Re:of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

except if their name is Google. I have to admire tnem for sticking to their ideals and doing their best to minimize spoofing. I hope they're never forced into a position where they're forced to comprimise. It'd be encouraging if they had some sort of contractual self destruct mechanism that'd force themselves to shut down if they or future management had no choice but to comprimise, rather than drag everyone through a steady decline from greatness while taking the easy way out.

It is obvious how Google does it...

[Sanga]

It involved selling their soles to a dyslexic, spelling challenged shoe-salesman with horns :-)

Re:It is obvious how Google does it...

[Agronomous Cowherd]

I get it.. sold their sole.. to a shoe salesman . heheh :)

Re:It is obvious how Google does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, you know I really did not get that (I'm not being sarcastic, but rather am being humorously serious), and wondered what the hell he was talking about.

Nothings perfect....

[Anonymous Coward]

in this world...

Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

yep

[twiggy]

Yes, it still happens a lot... there's widespread knowledge of so-called "google bombing".. Google pops up some of its search results based on the content between an A HREF tag, as you can read about here: Google Time Bomb...

Much like security, I think this is the kind of thing that hackers and tinkerers will always find a way to exploit. The question is who can stay ahead in the race?

Re:yep

[Dwedit]

The minute someone does a sucessful googlebomb, news reporting that googlebomb ends up taking the results immediatly afterwards. Typing in certain common googlebombed terms results in getting information ABOUT the googlebombs, rather than the bombs themselves.

Re:yep

[ceejayoz]

That's because they're mostly a novelty at the moment. If they become more widespread, that pattern won't be seen.

the new status quo

[Greg@RageNet]

The new status quo for search engines seems to be to charge for submission, as many of them now require you to go through a third-party that charges to add your site to the database. The variation of that (ie yahoo) has 'sponsored' sites in each category that appear at the top of the page. A friend runs a site that uses this 'sponsored' system and I'm told those sponsors bid against each other and whoever has the highest bid appears.. kinda like an EBAY for search engines.

-- Greg

Re:the new status quo

[Evro]

Yahoo does not charge for submission, but you'll likely never make it into their db either, because everyone submits. If you pay them $200 then you're guaranteed that they will review your site within 2 weeks, though this does not guarantee you'll be in their directory.

It's also worthwhile to mention that Yahoo's not really a search engine in the sense of something that crawls the internet looking for info; they generally rely on submissions, with which they're surely inundated, and that tiny subset of the internet is what they search.

As for sponsored links, 75% of the "sponsored links" on search engines are culled from Overture (formerly goto.com). Goto took a lot of heat back in the day for selling search results, but they've found a market in selling these results to other engines. Until like 3 or 4 months ago, their results were on Yahoo, AOL, Netscape, Altavista, and most other search engines. Then Google got into the bid-for-keywords market with their Adwords Select program. Now in addition to searches on google.com, Google's adwords show up on searches on AOL, Earthlink, and a few others. The process is basically as you described - bidding for keywords. Usually it's not worth bothering unless you're in the top 3 for that keyword on Overture, as those are the ones that show up on Yahoo (I think #4 and #5 show up at the bottom of the page). On Google I've seen up to 8 ads for a given keyword (e.g. computers) but AOL only takes the top 3 for its "sponsored matches" as well.

On Google it's important to note that the sponsored sites and the real search results are completely separate (dependent on how much you trust google, of course, but they have a lot of karma built up), and google's results are gleaned from having their robot (Googlebot) crawl the web, not from submissions; and the algorithm that ranks sites is another matter entirely. E.g. a search for "ass grabbing computers" predictably has 0 results, but there are plenty of ads for the word 'computer' that pop up.

It's doubly important to note the above about google since many Yahoo searches fall through to google when there aren't any results in yahoo's (IMO Lame) directory, so the results from yahoo are not as paid-for as you seem to imply.

Re:the new status quo

[permaculture]

I was looking for the cost of an external firewire hard drive, and tried www.google.co.uk. Restricting the search to UK sites, I tried a few of the results. All the sponsored links quoted in dollars, but all the normal links quoted in pounds. What's that all about? :-)

Re:the new status quo

[eCommando]

I have been able to rank high, usually within the first page, on Google, Overture, and MSN with the Key Words I selected on some of the web sites that I have. On one popular search term, my result is coming up as the first result. I have my own Domain name and don't have that many incoming links on one of those sites. I just started actively listing the sites on search engines about 2 months, but I read all the article that I get my hands on about search engine optimization. I am not using doorway pages, no cloaking, no link farms, no google bombing. The wired article about search engine optimization seems to work pretty well.

Re:the new status quo

[Evro]

Same with us, are you referring to the hotwired SEO article? When I started working here we were barely ranked at all in Google; now we are usually within the first page or two for any searches of our products. The problem we've been having is that Google links to the section that the product is in rather than to the product itself. This should be fixed the next time google's search index gets updated, however. I just wish Google's search index wasn't always 4-6 weeks old.

who cares?

[reaper20]

Nine times out of ten, when using Google, exactly what I am looking for is in one of the first few links.

I had a boss that was asking me "How do we improve our site on google?"

Answer: Provide actual information instead of some glossy maketrdroid garbage that is so prevalent in webpages today and you wouldn't have to worry about the search engines would you?

Re:who cares?

[Frank of Earth]

True. But you can have the most related site and like the article states, unless the domain or pages match the content, most likely, you will not rank high.

Let's say you had the best article in the world about installed redhat, but the link was to www.fperkins.com/tip.cgi?101

Forget about it, you just won't get linked in the top 10. A good trick is to have your dynamic content create a static page which is, of course, dynamically created from the database. Then you would get something simliar to what allrecipes.com does.

Ie their recipe for "African Chicken Soup" is not recipe_view.asp?id=100 but rather http://chicken.allrecipes.com/az/africanchickenste w.asp Not a great example, but you can understand my example, imagine something like "chicken recipe" etc.

Smart. Notice how they even have a subdomain to chicken.allrecipes.com which can be setup really easily for most sites, especially those that can alias any subdomain to the main domain.

Regardless, getting ranked in the top20 in Search Engines is some skill and knowledge and a lot of luck.

Re:who cares?

[captainstupid]

"Answer: Provide actual information instead of some glossy maketrdroid garbage that is so prevalent in webpages today and you wouldn't have to worry about the search engines would you?"

Sometimes that's true, but not always. I created a site for a small business that sells fireplaces. When doing a google search for "fireplace", hundreds of sites show up before ours. One that especially irks me is a site that has about 6 pictures of fireplaces ... and that's it. The page I created has about 30-40 individual units with *pages* of technical data about each. My only guess is that our site is not linked to as many times as theirs.

My point is that providing *real* information helps you *none* in relation to Google rankings.

Re:who cares?

[EvilBudMan]

--I had a boss that was asking me "How do we improve our site on google?"--

You can't. Even Google can't. I remember what is was like just after beta. It was even simpler. Maybe a blank box and nothing else at all would be the best. No words, nothing, just a box on the home page. KISS goes a long way.

Re:who cares?

[HaggiZ]

Actual content is certainly key, but there are still things to do to improve your google ranking beyond that alone. It is quite an art-form and something that needs be constantly adjusted and monitored.

I'm suprised this thread has surfaced again, considering the beating it gets with the way CoS have been able to manipulate google.

Re:who cares?

[doom]

Couldn't you just pay for advertising on a number of popular sites? Then all of a sudden, a bunch of highly ranked sites are "voting" for you.

At a guess, Google does something clever to try and ignore banner ads, so you make some guesses as to how Google spots an ad, and only pay for ads that don't look like ads... (like, what if you paid for a "banner" ad, and then requested that the site just stick in an ordinary text link rather than a banner graphic?).

Re:who cares?

[Suppafly]

I think you could perhaps construct a google track which recursively linked back to your site so that it would appear that it was linked to a lot of times..

Re:who cares?

[RedWizzard]

This subject is well covered at the excellent Search Engine World. In particular this article provides a detailed list of things to do to build a site that will rank well on Google. The short summary though is exactly what you say: real content is critical to top Google rankings.

Mantids and hoardes oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a praying mantids, and what are these hoardes of google users doing to stop them!?

Aren't we getting just a bit rediculous...

[Anonymous Coward]

when we refer to things that changed only a few years ago as "modern day"??

Here's the page the submitter is trying to promote

[Anonymous Coward]

Nitrocack

Not very impressive, is it? Although it does have the word cack in it!

Another way to promote your site

[loosenut]

As far as I know, search engines only look at text content. So, if you want your site to be indexed, don't put a ton of relevant text in Flash or in images.

Re:Another way to promote your site

[inerte]

You can design Flash that shows the text when you view the pages source.

And images have the alt and link tags.

Re:Another way to promote your site

[inerte]

And images have the alt and link tags.

Sorry, the title tag.

Well...

[rbgaynor]

When I did a search on reliable web server through Google I found this link from Microsoft Dot-Com Companies Powered by Windows 2000 near the top. If Microsoft did manipulate Google to get higher placement they sure choose a poor page to boost.

Not since gnutella

[ThanatosNL]

I think that tactic was mostly used by porn/warez/mp3/etc sites to advertise...people would constantly be flooded with links to the Pam and Tommy Lee videos, for instance. Now that file sharing has be come so common, people don't go to those sites anymore. Also, I can't verify this, but it's possible that because of so many people using broadband connections, they can host homegrown ftp sites, as another alternative to the relatively fruitless search of decent illegal sites (though I would imagine pop-up disabling in mozilla would facilitate this).

Rotating search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

why not just do what these guys do and rotate the results so everyone has a chance at the top. Rolist

Re:Rotating search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

because that would be annoying. i for one don't like to bookmark things (as they get way too crowded) but, if i can remember search terms on google i can usually find the site i'm looking for.

"invisible links"

[hatrisc]

i met a guy at my lug who runs a consulting company, and all the webpages that they do, there is an "invisible link" put at the bottom that refers back to their site. invisible in the fact that it's the same color as the background... supposedly it's pretty effective as his site.... if only i could remember it... is highly ranked on google.

Re:"invisible links"

[Anonymous Coward]

.... if only i could remember it... is highly ranked on google.

You should try this Google search!

Re:"invisible links"

[hazyshadeofwinter]

Elmer Fudd? j00 n33dz t0 us3 teh 0n3 7ru3 d14l3c7!!!!

Reliability of Google results

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with the article that oddball pages on one of the big "free website" sites seem to get premiere billing on Google. Furthermore, the accuracy of Google definitely relates to what's being searched for: I've searched for plenty of things where I've gotten page after page of links that don't even have all of the search terms, much less useful content. I don't expect it to read my mind, but sometimes it isn't completely accurate.

Re:An interesting question

[NorthDude]

Hummmm,
Google search

In fact, KDENews appears on page one and page to, slashdot appears on apge 2 right after kdenews...

this trick works every time

[Dr. Awktagon]

Here's one I use all the time.. just follow these easy steps:

1. Create a well-designed, easy-to-use web site that follows accessibility and useability guidelines.
2. Fill the web site with useful, relevant information on a selection of topics.
3. Make sure the information is kept up to date, and don't let it become stale.
4. Allow this web site to become popular and authoritative, so lots of people link to it and reference it.

Now, watch your Google ranking rise to the top! IT'S THAT EASY! And you'll laugh all the way to the bank!

Re:this trick works every time

[inerte]

The most rational post here, without any doubts :-)

Re:this trick works every time

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you're on page 7 because you're hidden behind dozens of sites that actively Googlebomb

Re:this trick works every time

[shird]

4. Allow this web site to become popular and authoritative, so lots of people link to it and reference it.

Its this step which is the difficult part, how do people find your site? Through a search engine? Its a paradox which unfortuantly can only be solved by spamming / google bombing / advertising etc...

Re:this trick works every time

[Anonymous Coward]

5. ???
6. Profit! :D

Re:this trick works every time

[woogieoogieboogie]

Create a well-designed, easy-to-use web site that follows accessibility and useability guidelines.

You forgot to say "make sure it works in lynx because all disabled people use lynx as their browser."

Who makes the "guidelines" for usability. For accesibility? Do all disabled people get lumped together so that one guideline fit's all? Each disabled person has their own difficulties and there is no one size fits all approach. Disabled people are no different that any other person and it is up to them to empower themselves with the technology to view any webpage regardless of guidelines used.

Maybe we can use the gubment's guidelines and use PDF files which rate along with Flash as major web annoyances. I mean, so what if a disabled person gets annoyed having thir computer freeze because some clueless moron decided that the best way to give out a 1 page brochure was to put it into a 2 mb PDF. Don't you think disabled peopel get annoyed at this crap also. But it's okay, because it fit's the disability guidelline.

The best guideline any web developer can use is both common sense and do not interfere with the user regardless if they are disabled or not.

Re:this trick works every time

[Anonymous Coward]

5. Script your site with an ISAPI extension to identify when the Googlebot is crawling your site, and feed it pages containing every keyword imaginable.

Re:this trick works every time

[Anonymous Coward]

Dork.

Re:this trick works every time

[bilbobuggins]

sadly, while your 'plan' is admirably idealistic it has nothing to do with reality

product quality has nothing to do with popularity, you should know this - we're on a Linux-centric site after all

Re:this trick works every time

[Suppafly]

Create a well-designed, easy-to-use web site that follows accessibility and useability guidelines.

Fill the web site with useful, relevant information on a selection of topics.

Make sure the information is kept up to date, and don't let it become stale.

Allow this web site to become popular and authoritative, so lots of people link to it and reference it.

?????

Profit!!!

Re:this trick works every time

[Anonymous Coward]

Who makes the "guidelines" for usability. For accesibility?

Reasonbly intelligent people:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://section508.gov/

Re:this trick works every time

[FunkMonkey#9]

Who makes the "guidelines" for usability. For accesibility? Do all disabled people get lumped together so that one guideline fit's all?

Well, why don't you read up on the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative? That should answer your questions.

roatating search engine - Rolist

[Anonymous Coward]

why not just do what these guys do and rotate your results so everyone has a chance on the top. Rolist

Search Engine Optimization

[Anonymous Squonk]

Fantomaster is a good site that talks about advanced placement techniques like cloaking (providing alternate content for spiders that is different than what appears on normal browsers), spider IP addresses, etc.

Re:Search Engine Optimization

[timboy3]

Um, yeah, these techniques are great, but they are techniques for spamming. And they'll work pretty well right up until the search engine that you're trying to spam catches you, and then you will disappear from their index, and rightly so.

The battle between search engines and spammers trying to game those search engines is an arms race of sorts, and trying to naively use spam techniques to fool search engines is a bad idea, both morally and in terms of expected benefit. Search-engine spammers do this for a living, and so they are on the forefront of that arms race, in a sense. If you try to use their techniques from two years ago you will lose. (Disclaimer: I've worked for two different search engines that will remain nameless.)

--timboy

Re:An interesting question

[Anonymous Coward]

..no but something else "comes up" if you catch my meaning..

Re:An interesting question

[damiam]

Well, yes, but it's on the fourth results page.

The Britney Spears mystery

[Otter]

I'm done with work, it's 100 outside and I don't have AC at home so staying late to address the Britney Spears / Shavlik mystery seems like an attractive option...

The relevant bit on one of the Britney Spears pages seems to be:

<IMG src="http://sm6.sitemeter.com/meter.asp?site=sm6bs review&refer=http%3A//www.google.com/search%3Fhl%3 Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dlink%2 53Awww.shavlik.com%26btnG%3DGoogle+Search&hours=19 &minutes=59&rtype=1" border=0 title="Site Meter"></A>

Which, yeah, seems to be a roundabout bit of Google bombing.

The question is -- how does this help Shavlik? Presumably there aren't that many people searching for Britney Spears content who say, "Oooh, a way to push Windows patches through a network! I want that!" You'd think the Google algorithm would weight links according to their relevance to the search criteria.

Re:The Britney Spears mystery

[Anonymous Coward]

While Google gives Shavlik extra bonus points for those looking for Britney Spears, it seems likely that they probably also apply those bonus points for any other search as well : i.e. If Shavlik puts up a page on monkey mating, they'll start off with a very high score due to their Britney Spears earned bonus.

Re:The Britney Spears mystery

[foniksonik]

I'm thinking that's it is very possible that www.shavlik.com used to be owned by a spears fan who pronounced his/her site www. Shave Lick .com

anyone else agree/

Re:The Britney Spears mystery

[larien]

Think brand recognition. Someone does a search for Britney and a link pops up for Shavlik. The idea is that somewhere, that name gets lodged into the back of the brain and when it crops up again, the person thinks "I've heard that name somewhere before" and presumably is more inclined to look at them.

I'm not 100% sure that's the motivation or indeed, if it even works, but it's one explanation...

I know how I did it

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that whenever I search for Squeek's mom I'll find what I'm looking for at the top of the list....but that's probably because I spelled "squeek" wrong and so no one else uses it on their pages, but that's beside the point.

Hidden links and text...

[zoobaby]

are all over web pages and many search engines find them. I did a search for Fat Beaver (long story) and found a website that had "FAT" (dumb quotes) in black text on a black background. Googles handy toolbar has the highlight function, boy was I surprised.

You know what's really funny?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:
Adam lobbed the first Google Bomb as a joke, aimed squarely at a friend of his: Andy "Talentless Hack" Pressman. Amazingly, a year later, Adam's Google Bomb demonstrates tremendous staying power, as Andy's website is still the number one search result for "Talentless Hack"

But now, since he was the first one to do google bombing, "talentless hack" turns up one of his pages describing how to do it. The google bomb eventually turned on its maker!

Bombing google with blogs is just wrong...

[vawlk]

Bad bad people

PS, ignore my ecommerce link above...

Re:Bombing google with blogs is just wrong...

[Anonymous Coward]

"ingore my ecommerce links above?" Ok, if this is all true, then the following links will be weighted highly because they are on Slashdot, and thus will boost the rankings for the site to which they point for Google searches that contain the words:

Britney Spears Videos and MP3's

Britney Spears Nude

Britney Spears Naked Breasts

Britney Spears Porn

You can help in this experiment by adding these links to Angelfire, Geocities and AOL pages.

Can't have it both ways...

[gwernol]

From the article:

How To Promote Your Own Site
Clearly there is some awareness out there as to how to manipulate the search rankings, and following are a few methods that I think are common: ....
In no way am I promoting any method that encourages false search rank increases.

Is it just me or is there something just slightly contradictory about these statements?

Re:Can't have it both ways...

[inerte]

I think it's just you :-)

He says how you might do it, but he's not saying that you must do it.

The answer, my friends...

[bsDaemon]

is Blowin' in the wind

The Church of Scientology (allegedly) Does It

[banal avenger]

Of course it still happens. Just ask some opponents of the Church of Scientology.

Re:The Church of Scientology (allegedly) Does It

[AndroidCat]

Yeah, they created scores of web sites that all link to each other. Many of them are really run on the same server.

And then they blew xenu.net to the top of the list by their attempt to bludgen Google into removing the link with a bogus DMCA claim. Ha ha!

Re:The Church of Scientology (allegedly) Does It

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, that whole bunch of 'Church Of Scientology'-opponents is one big facade anyway.

I've sent emails to some of them with some *SERIOUS* questions but never have gotten a reply...

Go figure...

not right

[danny]

Google PageRank (and the search rankings, whch are different to that) are calculated per page, not per-site, so links on pages "in the wilderness" on obscure parts of AOL or Geocities don't count for much.

There may be some confusion because the Google Toolbar, when viewing a page that hasn't been indexed, tries to "guess" what it's PageRank would be based on the site PageRank... but that's not "real".

If you want to know more about Google, the place to go is the Webmaster World Google forum.

Danny.

Re:not right

[Anonymous Coward]

As the article stated, the empirical evidence clearly shows that obscure little pages earn the base ranking of their encapsulating site (there was a mantids example as well as a Ford Transmission example : Neither of which can be reasonably explained by actual links to them). Whether it is because the pageranking is by site, or because the base site has an index effectively boosting the ranking of each subpage, is immaterial: The result is exactly the same -> "Megaaggregate" site hosted pages almost always show up higher in the Google rankings, regardless of the actual number of links to them.

Re:not right

[mbauser2]

As the article stated, the empirical evidence clearly shows that obscure little pages earn the base ranking of their encapsulating site (there was a mantids example as well as a Ford Transmission example : Neither of which can be reasonably explained by actual links to them)

That's not empirical evidence; that's two anecdotes and a flawed premise. PageRank is not the only criteria for ranking pages. Pages get ranked by text analysis first, then PageRank. Those pages are probably ranking high because they've got good text scores on the subjects, either because they use the keywords on the page, or other sites link to them using the keywords.

If you use the Google toolbar to check the mantid search results, you'll actually see lower-PR sites in the results ahead of the page this guy is fixating on. That is empirical evidence that PageRank isn't everything, and that high-ranking results aren't necessarily the highest-PageRank pages, especially for obscurer search terms.

In fact, it's not a big deal to have brand-new pages, with only one or two incoming links land in the top 30 results at Google, especially with oddball searches like "ford transmission". (I did it last month for the term "lens filters".) In situations like that, it only takes a few good links (one of the transmission page's links is from About.com) to push a page into the top 10.

AOL has the largest userbase in America. If all it took to hit the top of search results was an AOL page, AOL would be the top of every search!

eBags

[Ken Treis]

While searching for a new diaper bag (the cheap ones only seem to last through 1 kid), I was amazed at how many Google search hits pointed back to eBags. You wouldn't always know it from the URLs, though. Some of the URLs were things like ebags-discount.com, bagsdirect.com, handbags.com, etc., making you think that there were several big bag retailers out there. Others were just plain insane; I remember one that was something like "best-basketball-bags-for-women-athletes.com".

Effectively, they circumvented Google's "site grouping" wherein all hits from one site get clustered under a smaller group. I got fed up with it and resolved not to buy anything from eBags.

But I thought to myself, "maybe they're Scientologists..."

Re:eBags

[AndroidCat]

Ha! Then you really don't want to buy what they're selling! :^)

Re:eBags

[_randy_64]

I had a similar experience recently, looking for some electronics. Nearly every link Google gave me pointed to a page that pointed back to Amazon. My guess is that this is another Internet "get rich quick" schemes. Amazon or whoever probably pays for each referral. So it's the referring sites that are trying to stack the odds in their favor, hoping to get rich from the referrals. Not.

Re:eBags

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon or whoever probably pays for each referral.

Underrated, Insightful. Anyone with points here actually reading on less than +2?

Re:eBags

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Lands End. They have THE best diaper bags. We wouldn't leave home without ours.

Fixing Google

[fm6]

Google ranks by popularity, and defines popularity as being linked from other popular sites. So if you can get the right sites to link to you, your ranking will improve. Which is actually quite fair -- it's a validation of your site by people whose judgment is objectively established.

I've heard accusations that Google can be "fixed" by creating lots of phony sites that link to your site. Scientology sites are famous for that. I'm sceptical -- thousands of links from sites nobody visits have less impact than one link from a site everybody visits.

Re:Fixing Google

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem, pointed out briefly by the article, is that every Geocities site, for example, starts off with votes in the bank, regardless of the number of sites that actually link to them (the page gives a couple of examples of geocities pages, but I've seen the same thing for pretty much all of the "free website" sites). If you start your own domain to advertise your flower planting service, you literally will start off with a much rockier foundation than to just go and set up a free GeoCities site. There is a problem there.

I don't think the problem is so much mischevious super linking (see the Shavlik thing), but rather just the unfairness of the "democracy". It's like have an election where the Republicans start off with 51% of the vote.

Re:Fixing Google

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with the replubicans starting off with 51% of the vote? That doesn't go very far towards counter acting the vote fraud and manipulation from the dem side every election.

Re:Fixing Google

[oh]

If you use google to search for something technical, quite often you'll get lots of results for a mailing list that is archived to a web site. Because each archived message usualy links to 5 or 6 others (next/prev in thread, by date, by author etc), each message must cound as being linked to lots of times. At least thats the only reason I can think of for a 3 line emails showing up in google searched so much.

Re:Fixing Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Scientology sites are famous for that.

Not all of them... Executive Software doesn't appear until after the 20th link for 'defragmenter' and even that's not their main site!

thousands of links from sites nobody visits have less impact than one link from a site everybody visits.

'Googlebombing' only really works for made-up phrases not used on 'real' sites.

Re:Fixing Google

[Mathness]

Well get this lack of fixing.

- Take a unknown site with almost no traffic, with links from /. and a friend.
- Put nothing of interrest on it, only update it once a year.
- For annoyance, make it all text and simple to use (sp?).
- Give the domain a name which makes sence to you.

This is what I did, apparently the domain name I selected was a name for a printer model, if people only do a search for the model (on Google), they get my site as the first choise.

The point of all this? When doing a search choose your search carefully, and use at least two words when possible.

No! Wrong!

[fm6]

That's absurd. Next you'll be telling us that we can raise our /. karma by writing posts that people actually enjoy reading! PUTTING CRAP ON THE INTERNET IS A FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT!!!

Not that I should admit to this...

[Latent IT]

But do a google search for crack/serial/warez.

For instance. Webcam32 Crack

Yes, I OWN webcam32. So there. ;p

The point is, the first THREE PAGES are .de spoofed pr0n pages. Someone figured it out.

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[Some Dumbass...]

For instance. Webcam32 Crack [google.com]

[snip]

The point is, the first THREE PAGES are .de spoofed pr0n pages. Someone figured it out.

"Five minutes later, 'webcam32' became the most popular search term in Google history..."

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[nsample]

That's because for that type of search you're supposed to use "astalavista." Really. Google's great, but the real hax0rZ know how to filter their own...

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[Anonymous Coward]

pfft... easy, add a -.de and they all go away.

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[RajivSLK]

No, that doesn't prove that google was manipulated.

The term "Webcam32 Crack" is such an obscure search term that there is no authoritative page. Google returned the most relevant information.

If you search for crap google will return crap ... no big deal.

-------
Here is a shameless link to my employers website to get all the voting power of Slashdot.org SHAMELESS LINK

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[Bodrius]

I think that his point was not that Google didn't work for those searches, but that the pr0n people figured Google out.

But I might be wrong...

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Actually Gnutella searches work pretty well for cracks as well. People download my stuff all the time, and PowerDVD is especially popular for some reason.

Re:Not that I should admit to this...

[Latent IT]

No, because if you search for *any program* crack, it returns the same pages. You didn't actually look at the link, did you?

Oh, and it didn't do this, say, six months ago.

Translation:

[RedBear]

"I run a pr0n^H^H^H^Hwebsite and would like to use the experience of /.ers to boost our ranking in Google.

Thanks In Advance"

All I want to know is, can we get free passes if we help you out? ;)

Re:Translation:

[Backov]

Absolutely. ;>

From my experience...

[MoThugz]

of using google, it will give the most relevant results if you use a combination of two words or more.

For example, when I searched for God in google a year ago, it returned a list of results, in which the first result is PHP-Nuke (it has fallen to 2nd now)...

So instead of finding religious enlightenment, I found a really kickass PHP based web portal which I still use till now.

PS: I think the main reason for this is that the default admin login for PHP-Nuke used to be God. That has been deleted since version 5.0 (I think).

Re:From my experience...

[inerte]

when I searched for God in google

You mean you didn't get one of these?

Google Limitations

[Evro]

Well this is less so when one accounts for Google's limitations. The biggest of these, in my experience (as someone who works for a site whose google rank directly affects sales) is the fact that Google apparently rarely indexes URLs that contain 3 or more CGI parameters after the "?" character.

For example, a search on google for "plaid socks" yields only 1 or 2 sites out of 100 that have 3 or more CGI parameters, when I'm sure there are many sites using very complicated urls (with session IDs, etc). Sure, this is just anecdotal evidence, but as someone whose product catalog was listed by urls that had at least 3 CGI parameters (and sometimes 5 or 6 depending on the referring URL) I can say with 90% confidence that having a "complicated" URL severely hurt us. What I ended up doing recently was using mod_rewrite to change all the listed URLs on our site from site.com/product.cgi?sku=something&section=2&style =4 to site.com/product/2/4/something.html, and lo and behold, the next time googlebot came by, those pages were indexed (I had verified that the problem was not that the pages had a low pagerank, but that they were not even being spidered at all).

What does this have to do with Google's relevance? Sure, they are returning relevant results when you search, but if they are arbitrarily not listing a site because its URL structure is too "complex" then there's a ton of possibly relevant content that they're missing. If you're someone who sells plaid socks for $10 less than your nearest competitor but Google isn't indexing your plaid socks page because of URL structure (exactly what was happening to us, except not for plaid socks) then you're really not getting the most relevant results. Which is not to say that what you DO see isn't relevant, it's just that there's possibly MORE relevant stuff that you won't ever see.

Fortunately Google has something in the works to cover this particular situation, but it doesn't really have anything to do with fixing their URL complexity policy.

Re:Google Limitations

[inerte]

Perhaps this is intentional so people won't use keywords directly on their links, ie:

http://example.com?this=is&an=example

Re:Google Limitations

[ttyRazor]

According to their "why isn't my site being linked?" page, apparently they go light on cgi indexing to avoid overwhelming the servers on the other end, and its likely they don't have much of a choice. Just a guess, but I'd imagine it would be hard to tell the difference between a sanely organized site which could be indexed as easily as a static site and one where every link could lead to a near infinite tree of unique and dynamic pages, such as cgi where it shows the same stuff only sorted differently, etc. Just blocking spidering might be enough to prevent that, but not everyone might set that, so then they'd just end up with an overwhelmed server and countless redundant pages.

Re:Google Limitations

[mesocyclone]

There is a way around this. If you set it up right, you can have a cgi that looks like

http://www.fiddle.dee/a/long/directory/path/here

where the cgi script is named "long".

In other words, you can make the question mark go away.

I've done this occasionally. I don't remember why, but it wasn't to fools google.

Re:Google Limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

>There is a way around this. If you set it up
>right, you can have a cgi that looks like

>http://www.fiddle.dee/a/long/directory/path/he re
>where the cgi script is named "long".

>In other words, you can make the question mark go away.

>I've done this occasionally. I don't remember why, but it wasn't to fools google.

I wish more people would do that.

Its more user friendly, as it reflects the way people organise stuff on their own filesystem.

Hierarchies are good

site/news
site/news/tech
site/news/press
site /downloads
etc

I've had lots of people say thats easier than "having to type .html on the end"

Re:Google Limitations

[awol]

This is one of my absolute pet peeves. www.caching.com/caching101.htm is a starting point for one of the factors that soooo many web designers seem to miss and that is that a page once created, can be cached _appropriately_ very easily of you just do the cache a favour and give static content a static URL. That way you are doing your server a favour as well since someone else can serve your page once someone nearby has asked for it.

I get so pissed off at sights that hide the true URL of a document behind bullshit asp/pl/dynamic URLs. It is just so brain dead. I know all the arguments that people will come back with from the commercial to the "deep linking" to the ease of dynamics, but I just think it would be easier to write out a physical page once and then serve it from there. I mean a catalogue is the perfect example of this point.

Re:Google Limitations

[Evro]

I get so pissed off at sights that hide the true URL of a document behind bullshit asp/pl/dynamic URLs. It is just so brain dead. I know all the arguments that people will come back with from the commercial to the "deep linking" to the ease of dynamics, but I just think it would be easier to write out a physical page once and then serve it from there. I mean a catalogue is the perfect example of this point.

I don't get what you're saying. Our product catalog is stored in an Oracle database. We don't have it in a CGI page because of "deep linking" or anything of the sort; we have dynamic URLs because our site content is dynamic. If you're implying that creating static pages for every single product would somehow be easier or better then I would have to ask if you know what you're talking about. If we want to change the price of an item now, we just change it in the DB and it takes 2 seconds. If we had 1,000 static HTML pages and we wanted to change the price of at item, obviously it would be way more involved.

Honestly I don't understand what exactly your pet peeve is. Even in the context of an online magazine, where an article would be generally static, there's tons of other content on the page that would need to change (banner ads, masthead, navigation, etc). The point of doing the stuff dynamically is so that when you want to make a change you don't have to whip out dreamweaver or a text editor and manually edit every single page.

Re:Google Limitations

[Evro]

Yes, I've seen that before as well. However our site was already up and running, and rather than break every bookmark and existing hyperlink to our product catalog, I thought it would MUCH easier to use mod_rewrite. And it turned out I was correct, as once mod_rewrite was installed, the RewriteRule took about 90 seconds to write, which is much faster than it would have been to rewrite our application.

google and others

[HD Webdev]

1) Look at the top scoring pages.

2) Look at the source of those pages.

3) Create your own pages patterned on the above.

4) lather, rinse, repeat...it's never hard to figure out what a search engine is looking for. (the hard part is how to not piss it off)

Re:google and others

[shird]

Actually this might not be entirely correct. It is actually possible to serve up alternate content to the search crawler to what everyone else sees, just by examining the IP or referrer.

Re:google and others

[HD Webdev]

Yes, I've done that quite a bit with Apache.

OTOH, easy removes itself from the equation.

"more evil than Satan himself"

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember this story?

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9911/15/search .e ngine.ms.idg/

More background reading

[Quixote]

I'm glad people are taking a closer look at Google's ranking algorithm. Hopefully, the scrutiny will make it more robust and tamper-proof.
Here are some more URLs that might be of interest:

• PageRank explained
• Google's Pagerank and how to make the most of it

Screw that - what's really cool is...

[FyRE666]

having your NAME come top of the list when you type it as a search ;-) See that Scott Porter bloke? That's me, that is! I also get second place, dunno who that imposter is at number 3 though... grrr... ;-)

Re:Screw that - what's really cool is...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Actually, doing a google search on your name and having absolutely nothing come up at all is far more elite.

Of course, it won't work for people who have common names, but there are those of us out there that don't wish to be in the glaring spotlight of the www.

Re:Screw that - what's really cool is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh. When I enter my name (no, I'm not gonna tell you) in Google, the first 5 PAGES of results refer to me. Then there are a few unrelated links strewn into the results.

And I thought I could read English!

[PacoSuarez]

"fondly"?
"yore"?
"prey"?
"folly"?
"impervious "?

My goodness! I guess Google will not classify this page as English!

Re:And I thought I could read English!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...which of those words isn't English? Please feel free to visit http://www.dictionary.com to verify the authenticity of all of them.

Thank you.

Re:And I thought I could read English!

[Anonymous Coward]

d00d wot r thos w3rds u writ i dun undastand

Re:An interesting question

[Anonymous Coward]

While the first story is about having sex with a goat, one must ponder why Google would show it when someone searches for goatse.cx...what's the correlation? Lots of people linked to that site with the text goatse.cx?

Basic Marketing

[Alien54]

I had a boss that was asking me "How do we improve our site on google?"

It really becomes a question of what kind of market searches to you want to show up in.

Random Searches? File searches? product searches?

What is your market? If you do not know what searches you want to show up in, then how can you push yourself higher in google?

You got fired, right?

[Pac]

Such an unbelivable display of ignorance on energising the synergies while leveraging the brand-awareness among the propesct client base shouldn't go unpunished.

Hmm, is this scenario illegal then?

[TrollsamaBinLaden]

Suppose I really hate pokemon and think digimon really kicks the crap of pokemon. I put up a site that is nothing put praise for digimon, but the metatags are filled with pokemon names and the like. Use the popularity of pokemon to sway engines to view digimon. How fast do you think one would get sued over this?

Re:Hmm, is this scenario illegal then?

[Ziviyr]

I dunno how fast you'd get sued, but your bandwidth costs will skyrocket. :-)

Re:Hmm, is this scenario illegal then?

[hazyshadeofwinter]

That's the sort of thing the Google algorithm exists to prevent. Try an Excite/whatever (umm, do any of the pre-Google search engines still exist?) for, say, "porn" and watch how the first 200 sites all have meta tags like "porn porno xxx porn porn spamity spam titties n beer porn nude photos of pikachu porn spammity porn".

Re:Hmm, is this scenario illegal then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meta tags are pretty much dead.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Alexa and the Google Bar

[shird]

From the article, I understand this is some software which monitors visited sites, and then ranks sites according to this.

For those running the Google bar with the page rank display enabled, every site you visit is being reported to Google. I would not be surprised if they used this information to help rank sites also.

When my websites needed to be ranked high...

[golemite]

I always check out SearchEngineForums.com for the latest advice. Ranked #4 for Audi S4 and #1, 3, 8-sorta, and 10 for my name ;)

Re:When my websites needed to be ranked high...

[schatten]

just wanted to say thanks for the forum link. I didn't know it existed and it should help!

I google almost exclusively,but what am I missing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use google almost exclusively. But what am I missing? I have a site that lists a 10 second Chevy Malibu street sleeper (not my car), and while that page has finally entered google's search engine, other pages such as the main page that lists other merchandise for sale such as computer monitors for sale, antiques for sale including antique violins, collectibles, telephone jacks and equipment, a Dodge Ramcharger , a web server or high school, college computer , Racing Champions 1/24 scale dragsters, funny cars and pro stock die cast cars for sale, and other items, have not entered the google search engine for months.

If it takes 3-4 months for one of my web pages or sites to be listed, how many up-to-date pages or sites am I missing because google wants payment for listings? Has anyone done any studies or research on pages or sites missed by google for months because they prefer to get paid for listings for quick inclusion or they leave you hanging? How many people won't see my site offering free text listings to others due to google's demand for payment?

There's a really easy way to bias Google results

[sgtsanity]

Spike the pigeon food.

Multiple sites with same content...

[M-G]

We had an interesting situation with Google. Since the company changed names a while back, two domain names point to the same site (although with two different IP addresses).

Links on Google would show up under one site name, but not the other. Apparently Google does something on the back-end to determine that the contents are identical and assign the listing to one of the domain names (in this case the older one).

Only after feeding all visits to the old domain with a 301 and then sending them along to the new domain name did Google's results update to only indicate the new one.

Re:Multiple sites with same content...

[borud]

you have no idea how common this is and how painful it is to make something which is fairly reliable *and* efficient to, if not solve, at least reduce the problem.

designing and implementing aggregation systems for large scale search engines in general is a rather challenging task which is not often mentioned when people talk about search engines. It challenging because it is the part of a search engine that has to deal with all the foolishness of the web.

Google ranking tips

[Archon-X]

I *do* actually run porn sites, and stumbled upon getting very good rankings.

It all boils down to everything in moderation.

So you have 'normal' amount of meta-keywords, say about 5-9, and the same effect in the title.
Another one that is debated to work is
http://keyword1.keyword2.com/keyword3

Basically, IMO google trys to limit results to 'real' pages.

Easy.

[Wolfier]

What do pigeons like?

Put a META tag containing the follow words:
grain, rice, corn, worms, wheat - worked like a charm. You get the idea.

HUMANS do it better...

[Etcetera]

Just a shameless plug here for the Open Directory Project. Leaving aside occasional occurances of editor-fraud or editor-abuse (which are quickly tracked down by the meta-editors), this is the best way to determine a site's real value.

A human looking at the page to subjectively/objectively determine its value is something that can't be replaced by a spider and an AI program.

URL cloaking, hidden text, keyword tricks, etc... don't matter. =)

-jc

Re:HUMANS do it better...

[Caliper Remote]

Just to be clear, Google does use the Open Directory Project (directory.google.com)

Re:HUMANS do it better...

[Backov]

Humans would do it better...

If humans ever got around to doing it.

I know MANY webmasters still waiting for the sites to be reviewed, months later.

Cheers,
Backov

Re:HUMANS do it better...

[borud]

mod up parent.

Re:HUMANS do it better...

[funky womble]

Well, at least ODP is better than Yahoo...

Nitwit didn't do the reading.

[mbauser2]

He says:

I do not have access to Google's page ranking technology, and apart from some partial details on their site, they keep their ranking techniques tight lipped to avoid intentional rank manipulating. As such, everything I say in this article is purely speculative based upon analysis of search results for various terms and phrases

No details? They published the algorithm in 1999! If he looked it up, he would have understood PageRank is a page-to-page relationship (not site-to-site), and avoided the idiotic statement "Is it really a democracy that every page on these megalinked aggregate sites become premiere voices of their topic?".

Apparently, this moron didn't even search Google -- the paper is the third result for a search on "PageRank". Why are we taking search engine advice from some imbecile who doesn't use search engines?

The Google team publishes more inside information than any search engine. There's a whole ODP category for Google research papers.

To put that into perspective, there are some 750 pages dealing with mantids that are linked from Google, and that limit is simply because that's the maximum results that Google will return for a particular search term.

That's not even true. Google will return up to 1000 results in a search. Can this guy even count?

There are a lot of better resources about Google on the Web. Why did Slashdot go with this guy?

I wonder why this is the first link to my page is

[zakharin]

I wonder why http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zakharin/Software/zd-en try is the first entry in a Google search that points to my site. It is not actually on ZD-NET nor is it linked heavily from anywhere on my site or outside

Search engine manipulation is pretty common

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a number of techniques, some legitimate, some not so legitimate (search engines will ban you if they find out):

- optimizing for keywords in the title bar and in the text near the top of the page (legit)
- optimizing keywords by increasing their font size in the body of web pages(legit)
- detecting the user agent and crafting special pages if its a search engine hitting you (not legit)
- creating lots of "ghost" sites which have similar content, just different html so that you show up many different times on the search engines (not legit)
- optimizing urls so that they don't have .cgi or ? in them, as they are considered database generated and search engines like to avoid them (legit, I guess)
- tons of others.

However, as has already probably been said quite a few times already, it is very much moving to pay to play.

G'luck.

Tim Shephard
http://www.storepages.net - build your business website today

You're an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

He GAVE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of the "page-to-page" relationship being disproven, but here you are, the second tard bait coming to "set the record straight". Do a search on virtually anything, and a good portion of the results will come from aggregate sites: DO SOME TESTS, MORON. Exactly as he clearly stated: Whether the results are because of the site internally linking (inflating each sub-page), in the case of page-to-page linking, or it's site-to-site, THE RESULTS ARE THE SAME: Some random guy's Ford Transmission site becomes #1.

No details? They published the algorithm [stanford.edu] in 1999!

Gee, it's not like something could have changed in 3 years. Regardless, Google will not tell you your PageRank, but instead will obscure it as a bar graph. Why do you think that is? Many people are still unsure what the effects of domain names are in Google rankings, yet clearly they have a profound effect. PageRank is NOT A PUBLISHED ALGORITHM.

That's not even true. Google will return up to 1000 results in a search. Can this guy even count?

I will concur with that, however it depends on the search phrase. I've had several search phrases where Google seems to limit it to 750, and I presume he encountered the same thing.

My guess is that it's a problem with IP numbers.

[mbauser2]

While Google gives Shavlik extra bonus points for those looking for Britney Spears,

Google doesn't give points for "looking", it gives rank for "linking". Shavlik has a high PageRank because lots of people have linked to it (or Google thinks they've looked to it).

it seems likely that they probably also apply those bonus points for any other search as well : i.e. If Shavlik puts up a page on monkey mating, they'll start off with a very high score due to their Britney Spears earned bonus.

Yes, a page's PageRank affects its ranking in all relevant searches, but the point is that Google shouldn't be showing Shavlik in a search for "Britney Spears" at all, unless it has indexed some text that associates Shavlik with Britney Spears. Google results are a "two-pass" system: Google analyzes text to find which pages are relevant to a search, then uses PageRank to finish ranking them.

In fact, looking at Google's cache of Shavlik's home page, we can see that Google thinks other sites are linking to Shavlik using the words "Britney Spears". That is why Google is associating the site with Britney Spears.

There is some anecdotal evidence that Google's robot (Googlebot) can get confused when IP numbers are reassigned. Googlebot caches IP lookups longer than normal: If an IP number gets reassigned from one domain to another, Google (temporarily?) thinks both domains are the same site, and mixes up their listings. Given that shavlik.com is being confused with a defunct domain, it may have accidentally inherited the IP address of britneyspearsnow.com.

(I have now used the words "Britney Spears" more in this post than I have in any conversation in my life.)

Sounds like you're the nitwit

[Anonymous Coward]

You've clearly got some anger issues. You must be trying to follow this technique:

Give yourself some freebies by using the signature line or link to address on discussion boards to point to your own site. Throw your opinion into every discussion regardless of your experience or lack thereof.

All but one of the "whole ODP category" papers is from 1999 or earlier (before Google really hit the bigtime), and hence are thoroughly useless. Secondly, as the other post mentioned your claims that the PageRank algorithm is transparent is absolutely laughable: Either you're a naive little boy, or you're painfully ignorant.

Take some anger pills and get over it. I read the paper as a pretty lighthearted rambling regarding search engines, not as a self-professed expert on Google (as you are apparently trying to cast yourself).

Sucker sites

[1u3hr]

I was wonderng if there was a Kazaa client for Macs, so I did a Google search for "Kazaa Macintosh". The first two hits were for kazaa.metamule.com/kazaa-macintosh and kazaa.metamule.com/kazaa-for-macintosh Both these were gibberish pages ("If you are shopping for kazaa macintosh on the internet, then you had better stop here. Our site is considered among the premier kazaa macintosh locations around...")which immediately refreshed to another site. Obviously these are automaically generated subdomains, pages and text designed to gather search engines. Possibly they have little real effect beyond annoyance, as in this case there are NO real pages on the subject which would displace the bullshit pages.

Google Bombing

[Robotech_Master]

One form of Google manipulation that recently hit the scene is known as Google bombing--to wit, getting a lot of people to link to a particular site with certain key words. It was done a lot with blogging, as the article indicates: by linking to a certain artist's page using the words "talentless hack," they caused that artist's page to come up first when one typed "talentless hack" into the search engine.

Re:Google Bombing

[Suppafly]

they should work those links into the bottom of those cut and paste quiz results that are so popular on livejournal..

YAGA - Yet Another Google Article

[meehawl]

Slashdot definitely needs a Google icon.

Mod up

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny + Insightful , because its probably true:)

Oh yeah, it sure does get manipulated.

[shepd]

Here's a model of motherboard I own: MS5129. I was searching for a PDF manual for it (not much luck though).

Check the results. Are there _any_ relevant ones?

Pretty much nope.

Re:Oh yeah, it sure does get manipulated.

[hazyshadeofwinter]

Huh? The second one down was a BIOS download. Third one looked relevant too. And you didn't even include "manual" in your search terms. I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find examples of google returning garbage results, or pages that have since been taken down (try a warez or porn search maybe), but that was a bad example.

Re:Oh yeah, it sure does get manipulated.

[brett42]

Are you sure it's ms5129? a search for msi 5129 has a manual as the first link.

Re:Oh yeah, it sure does get manipulated.

[frankie]

I was searching for a PDF manual. Check the results. Are there _any_ relevant ones?

Shepd, it's not Google's fault that you suck at using web search. Notice that I didn't even bother adding pdf to the search terms and filtering with &lr=lang_en to avoid pages in Chinese.

Re:My guess is that it's a problem with IP numbers

[GigsVT]

There is some anecdotal evidence that Google's robot (Googlebot) can get confused when IP numbers are reassigned.

Oh yes, this was a real problem for me. I run poetrycontestonline.com and I also registered psychicweb.net in an insane fit, thinking I could capitalize on the Ms. Cleo and John Edward syndrome. I let psychicweb.net expire after pointing it to the same IP address as poetrycontestonline.com as a virtual host. For months after psychicweb.net expired, google thought that poetrycontestonline.com was psychicweb.net. A search for poetrycontestonline.com would yield cache links that had psychicweb.net as the domain name. Also, searches on things like "Free Poetry Contest" would yield links to psychicweb.net and not poetrycontestonline.com, which means that after the domain expired, I was effectively removed from google for almost a year.

I hope they got it fixed now, because this behavior was very annoying. Had my site been more of a real business site, I would have been pretty pissed off about it.

Dear Mr. Expert

[Anonymous Coward]

PageRank is not the only criteria for ranking pages.

Funny, but I read an article that was talking about the ranking of pages on Google, not on the PageRank algorithm. You seem a tad fixated, and you seem to be refuting yourself. The guy was talking about "why does Google order results the way it does" (which is a mystery to even self-proclaimed experts as yourself), not "How does this relate to the PageRank algorithm".

That's not empirical evidence; that's two anecdotes and a flawed premise

Empirical: Relying on or derived from observation or experiment.

Sounds like empirical evidence to me: He noticed a preponderance of Geocities sites and became curious as to why they're there.

If you use the Google toolbar to check the mantid search results, you'll actually see lower-PR sites in the results ahead of the page this guy is fixating on. That is empirical evidence that PageRank isn't everything, and that high-ranking results aren't necessarily the highest-PageRank pages, especially for obscurer search terms.

You seem to be arguing with yourself. This whole discussion is about the obscurity of Google's search result ordering, and how people are taking advantage of it (such as in the URL), and here you come coming to save the day and explain how the PageRank algorithm explains it all away. Oh, but wait, no it doesn't...it's only one of the many mysterious machinations at Google...Pick an argument and stick with it.

especially with oddball searches like "ford transmission"

You'd call that an "oddball search"? Jesus you're an apologist. Here's another "oddball" search : siamese kitten: The second link is to a members.aol.com (5 links in the world to it, 1 being the open directory submission) site, and the third is to a geocities.com site. How about Commander Keen: Of the first page (littered with geocities, angelfire, and hometown.aol.com links), #3 is this page. I suppose I should do more normal searches like...Britney Spears?

Hop off your expert soapbox and quit spamming Slashdot with your link : You're just making a fool of yourself.

Here's how:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Make a website

2) ???

3) #1 on Google!

Focus

[Anonymous Coward]

Over time, more and more people will figure out how to game the system. Even though it may be a for-profit company, Google is now an important public service that many people rely on. I hope they keep up the trust the public has put in them. Specifically, they shouldn't get sidetracked in to all sorts of side projects and make sure they care about one thing: hosted search.

If they ever start selling applications to the end user, we'll know they're dead...

Yeah, it's a little overkill..

[jx100]

Do something Slashdot-worthy, like getting the DMCA overturned, and people will find your site.

Getting a good Google rank is child's play

[epeus]

My 7-year-old son Andrew has top placement for his name and first and third placement for 'funniest stories', not to mention a Googlewhack for Google horklump

How did he do that? Here's the explanation - far shorter and clearer than that article.

Re:Getting a good Google rank is child's play

[Ronnie Coote]

I'm sure your 7-year-old will be _really_ happy that Dad has just destroyed his Googlewhack by posting his precious phrase on Slashdot....

Re:Getting a good Google rank is child's play

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, the whole problem with that premise is that if it's so "easy" (nice living through your kid, by the way), then everyone would have the number 1 rank for every phrase. Oh, wait, that's not possible...

The fact that your "kid's" page gets good rankings for pretty common phrases points out the mystery of Google more than it shows some genius of you, err, your child.

Re:Getting a good Google rank is child's play

[epeus]

My original post was somewhat tongue in cheek, but the method outlined there does work. Find something interesting to say, and tell people who find it interesting about it so they link to it. The secret is to maintain a weblog, and have friends with weblogs that are highly linked-to as well. How do you make such friends? By reading their work and commenting on it intelligently, and by writing things that they find interesting enough to point to as well.

As for the 'living through your kid' bit, I made that page because Andrew asked me to - he's a bit bored of it now, but I'm sure he'll come back to it. My own weblog ranks fairly well too - try searching for 'mame roms'...

Local experts

[dirvish]

You guys must have allready read that 'still happen?' article.

I have certainly seen some people taking the articles advice here on slashdot: "* Give yourself some freebies by using the signature line or link to address on discussion boards to point to your own site. Throw your opinion into every discussion regardless of your experience or lack thereof."

Google has some problems...

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Google seem to be struggling with the amount of crap they have ended up indexing.

So much so, that google places A LOT of weight in having a Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) entry for a site.

Google used to be great, but i'm starting to find even the top results can be pretty much bunk, and have to look a few pages into the results to find something really relevant.

Another problem is their AdWords service.

AdWords NEED to be more expensive so that only real companies can afford them, and not some sad act operating a "25 Trillions Hits for $1" service. :(

I think.

I'm Feeling Lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

And I have been for years for keywords like
"database administration", "ERP administration",
"sql scripts".

I write content and stuff it in simple crusty
HTML with a Nielsen-Norman rip-off format.

The secret is to just say something real and
forget the snakey tricks.

Britney Spars

[Anonymous Coward]

OK I give up, what the hell is a Britney Spear? I did a search for britney spear weaponry and got this Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing ... I think someone is pulling our collective chain here?

And you're an anonymous, disingenuous idiot.

[mbauser2]

He GAVE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES of the "page-to-page" relationship being disproven

He gave two bogus examples. Two searches on oddball terms where AOL and Geocities pages rank well isn't proof that pages gets high ranking from their hosts. I could come up with thousands of instances where AOL and Geocities pages don't appear in the top 10.

Do a search on virtually anything, and a good portion of the results will come from aggregate sites: DO SOME TESTS, MORON.

I've probably done a great deal more tests than you or the guy who wrote that article.

Random Test #1: 24,200 results from AOL for the word "beer", but the top ten results for "beer" include no AOL listings.

Not-As-Random Test #2: 22,100 results from AOL for the word "Ford", but the top 10 results for "Ford" include no AOL listings.

Even-Less-Random Test #3: 3,020 results from AOL for "Britney Spears", but not a single result from AOL in the top 10 results for "Britney Spears" that the original article fixated on.

Is are any of you Anonymous Cowards getting the point? AOL has so many members that there's probably an AOL page for almost any subject you can think of. If Google ranked pages high just for being on AOL, AOL would be topping every search. It doesn't. His theory is disproven.

This guy built a theory on a few examples, and didn't even bother to try to disprove his hypothesis. He didn't even spot the clue in his "Britney Spears" search. He's a nitwit. He doesn't know how to collect evidence and he doesn't understand two key facts about Google:

1) Google does text analysis, too, and it does it before taking PageRank into account. That page that tops the "Ford transmission" search really is entirely about Ford transmissions. It probably scores well in text analyses.

2) Not all searches are equal. If you use combinations ("ford transmission") or obscurer terms ("mantid"), it's easier for a small page to place high, because there's less competition overall.

Gee, it's not like something could have changed in 3 years.

I didn't say nothing has changed in three years. I said there's enough in the published papers to show that pages don't get their PageRank from being on AOL.

Many people are still unsure what the effects of domain names are in Google rankings, yet clearly they have a profound effect.

Hmm, let's see: If I wanted to know the effects of domain names in Google, where would I look? How about the very paper cited in the WebmasterWorld discussion you linked to? It says, among other things:

There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits. Fancy hits include hits occurring in a URL, title, anchor text, or meta tag. Plain hits include everything else.

So, again, the Google team said back in 1998 that keywords in the URLs (and thus, keywords in domain names) are more significant than keywords in plain text. It's amazing what you can learn when you do the background reading.

PageRank is NOT A PUBLISHED ALGORITHM [webmasterworld.com].

You know, typing in all-caps doesn't actually make you smarter. There are actually two papers that have the basic algorithm published in them. It's been tweaked since then (probably, mostly by tweaking the dampening factor on pages flagged as problematic by other algorithms), but it's still the same basic equation.

(While we're at it, if you actually read Webmasterworld on a regular basis (instead of pulling that link out of Google, like I'm sure you did), you would know that not a single sane, professional webmaster in the world believes that AOL sites get the gigantic boost that the original article author claimed. There's been a gigantic amount of research done on this subject by a considerable number of professional search engine optimizers, and every single one disagrees with this nitwit.)

Re:And you're an anonymous, disingenuous idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really do painfully try to make a strawman argument out of what he's said. He specifically says that pages on an aggregate site get a bonus, not that they are the be all and end all (despite your idiotic continual references ot "AOL would rule the world!").

You accuse him of refusing to accept any proof that that might not always hold true, but then you go and do the same thing. Here, sitting at my desk, the first thing I could think up for a generic search is "business card": This is something that millions of people have, it's a thriving operation in the printing world: There should be literally millions of pages on the topic, and the order the Google returns hits is crucially important to all involved. At number 6 is members.aol.com, with a single instance of "business card" on the entire page (and it's not within the 8 word body). Randomly picking, link #61 is this page with business card directly in the title, and in the body six times. Tell us again how wrong his assertion is jedi master?

Simple intellect tells me that he's talking about everyday, average pages, not "hyper competition" pages such as beer or Britney Spears (which was known to be a heavily googlebombed term), and it looks to me like he is absolutely correct, despite your slobbering yabberings otherwise.

He was too writing about PageRank.

[mbauser2]

Funny, but I read an article that was talking about the ranking of pages on Google, not on the PageRank algorithm.

Here's how the original article author described Google's ranking:

The Google ranking technique, in a nutshell, is that every link provided to a site is a vote for the site, with the weighting of the vote being determined by the number of votes that the voting site itself has received

Compare that to Google's definition of PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

They're the same explanation. Whether he called it that or not, the article author was writing entirely about PageRank. His theory is all about links (and the incorrect assumption that being on the same domain is a link). His article is about PageRank, and to pretend otherwise is deceptive.

This whole discussion is about the obscurity of Google's search result ordering, and how people are taking advantage of it (such as in the URL), and here you come coming to save the day and explain how the PageRank algorithm explains it all away. Oh, but wait, no it doesn't...it's only one of the many mysterious machinations at Google...Pick an argument and stick with it.

I have one and only one argument. You're just not bright enough to understand it. The argument, again, is: The links to a site are not the only criteria determining a page's placement in search results. It's not even the first criteria! (Go read this paper, and you'll see that Google does text ranking, then factors in PageRank.) That guy's entire theory is based on a flawed assumption.

quit spamming Slashdot with your link

I didn't include a single link in the post you're replying to.

Re:He was too writing about PageRank.

[danny]

Indeed! Google solved the "Microsoft's homepage will rank top for any word on it" problem a long time ago, by taking links anchors into account.

As an example of that, my PR 8 homepage has a reference to "Sidewalks of New York" on it, but ranks 530th on a search for that phrase. That's largely because none of the links to my homepage contain the words "sidewalks" or "york".

Danny.

Re:He was too writing about PageRank.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether he called it that or not, the article author was writing entirely about PageRank. His theory is all about links (and the incorrect assumption that being on the same domain is a link). His article is about PageRank, and to pretend otherwise is deceptive.

You know it took me about 20 seconds to do several (err, "empirical") tests of very common phrases (phrases that should cover hundreds of thousands of businesses and tip pages throughout the land. The Internet isn't just a couple of pages) proving his point that "aggregate" sites are favoured by Google. Search for "swimming pools" (There are millions of these across the land, and there are many swimming pool stores in every city): Link number 9 is a short geocities page with 3 links in the entire world. Perhaps you're note bright enough to understand this, but it is painfully obvious that he is right, and sites on systems like GeoCities are afforded an increased ranking.

I have one and only one argument. You're just not bright enough to understand it. The argument, again, is: The links to a site are not the only criteria determining a page's placement in search results. It's not even the first criteria!

Could you explain again how Shavlik appears as one of the top links for Britney Spears? Oh, right, your logic makes absolutely no sense. I'm not saying the guy is right, but your cut and dry self-defense just seems utterly idiotic, and is contrary to countless evidence otherwise. Everytime I've ever read about Google, it has talked about theories of how Google ranks pages, and how to get your page in the top rankings: Few have been so idiotic, and ignorant, as to make such bold claims of conclusion as you have.

That's ignoring that his summary included talk about text matching and URL text matching, rendering your "it's all about PageRanking" absolutely absurd.

missing steps

[Snover]

I believe you missed these steps:

Step 5. ...
Step 6. Profit!

Shouldn't take much.

[Anomolous Cowturd]

<body>
<div style="display: none">
<h1>Stuff for google</h1>
Unless I'm mistaken google doesn't handle style sheets very intelligently.
Just use something like this, or maybe an external style sheet to fool it.
All the stuff in the div tag should be indexed by google but not displayed
in a browser.
</div>
Then put you visible content here.
Maybe they've fixed this by now? Would be a chore to handle external style sheets correctly though...
</body>
</html>

did you read his post?

[Trepidity]

That's exactly what he said he ended up with as a solution, using the mod_rewrite module.

Re:did you read his post?

[funky womble]

Not necessarily: there's always PATH_INFO.

Pigeons

[davidsansome]

We all know that pigeons are WAY too smart to fall for anything we can throw at them.

Commenting on nothing, eh?

[Bemmu]

What was the most interesting part of this article was their idea that you should comment about everything talked about on discussion sites, whether you know something about the subject or not.

Jakob Nielsen's Technique

[Pointdexter]

"...extraneous filler words in the META tags or hidden at the bottom of the page."

I noticed the other day that self styled "King of Usability" and Benny Hill look-a-like, Jakob Nielsen uses this technique on his very own page.

Cheers
PD

Re:Jakob Nielsen's Technique

[kiwirob]

Good spotting! Dr Jakob is using this trick of hidden text at the bottom of the page. I doubt he would ever get in trouble for it though as all he is doing is listing come common misspellings of his name.

Another thing to note is that he is using a CSS class to redefine how the text looks. This is a common but effective trick in search engine optimization. Most search engines give pages a boost when they use the horribly ugly <h1>Heading 1 Tag</h1>.

If you would like to get the boost that this <h1> Heading 1 Tag</h1> gives WITHOUT is looking so darn ugly put something like this in your CSS

H1 {
color:#000000;
font-size:12pt;
font-family:helevetica
}

Another very effective technique I often use to include a number of text links at the bottom of every page on your site link this

<a href="page1">Keywords for Page 1 </a> |
<a href="page2">Keywords for Page 2 </a> |
<a href="page3">Keywords for Page 3 </a> |
<a href="page4">Keywords for Page 4 </a> |
<a href="page5">Keywords for Page 5 </a>


These links become part of your site navigation just like the links at the top of your page that are often images. Search Engines LOVE keywords in text links.

Obscurity.

[leuk_he]

Obscurity.Obscurity. That is one of the problems of google. If i search for my name it should come up with my homepage. The outcome varies each week.

-It disappeared.
-it ranks no 1.
-it ranks no 7.

Why? It's very fuzzy. Should i create a backup homepage? That is is not always no 1 is understandable since someone else with my name exists (propably dead, causing more stir with that than a alive me!)

What do i want? I want people who can not remember my email to be able to find my homepage&email . (free provider yabaa yabaa)

What about this trick?

[DABANSHEE]

I heard some sites used to fill up their backrounds with words that had a font the same colour as the background.

Since no-one's mentioned them yet ...

[the bluebrain]

... I shall mention etoy, since I remember them to be at least one of the first to manipulate search engine rankings in an amusing manner. Does anyone else remember the "hijackings" they did? You entered a conventional search term, e.g. "cooking chicken", and the n-th link of the results, if you clicked on it, took to to a big ol' page saying "YOU HAVE BEEN HIJACKED" yadda yadda. Entertaining, albeit politically incorrect, especially nowadays.

The neat thing was that they had their rankings down to a fine art - they could say "we want our page to be no. 2 on yahoo, no. 5 on altavista, and no. 1 on webcrawler" ... any hey presto, it was. Neat. The engine guys hated them, of course ... as did etoys.com - the altercation etoy.com had with *them* is probably where most people know them from.

There's an article on wired, but I haven't been able to come up with anything on their internet hijacks.

Oh well. I'm feeling old in Internet years right now.

Quantum Slashdot Effect on Google

[Ruteus]

One of the Google ranking algorithms is based on how many people click on each offered link. By slashdotting a demo that discusses the 7th returned link on "mantids," enough people may click on the link to change its position. You can't interact with Google without changing it!

Re:Quantum Slashdot Effect on Google

[mbauser2]

One of the Google ranking algorithms is based on how many people click on each offered link.

No, it's not.

Look at the source code of Google results pages. Google links directly to the pages listed. If Google was ranking by clickthrough, it would have to link through a redirect like Yahoo does. (Or, if you want to get really complicated, put a web bug on every page listed in the index, but that would require the cooperation of every webmaster with a site in the index. Not gonna happen.)

Google does through in some link-tracking every few zillion results, but (according to them) that's for quality control, not click-ranking. If the random spot-checks show that people are having to dig deep into results, Google will tweak their alogrithms, not just move sites up in arbitrary searches.

A great way to boost your Google ranking

[MUTU]

A very efficient way of boosting your google ranking is to be listed on the DMOZ Open Directory Project. Google gives so much importance to listings there, so it is a good idea to try your best to be listed there.

Also, since Google works by checking the links to you, it's a good idea to go through your web server logs to find which are the pages which are linking to you. Submit those to as many search engines as you can afford to. Besides having Google seeing more links to you, more people would be entering that page which is linking to you, and thus more people are likely to click on your link. Hence more hits!

Re:A great way to boost your Google ranking

[SMS1]

cool. this really works!

Recursive...

[funky womble]

So, how does a link to google search results affect pageranks...? I wonder if it's possible to get google to return a link to the very same page it's displaying!

Re:An interesting question

[jweatherley]

But what is www.osdn.com/about.shtml doing at number 4 on page 1!

Re:My guess is that it's a problem with IP numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

If, indeed, Google is ranking links by IP address then it's a brutally flawed concept to begin with: There are thousands of IPs that each host many (sometimes thousands) of websites via host headers and HTTP 1.1: If Google is confused that Shavlik is another page because it inherited it's IP, then Google can't be considered valid for any search.

Wormy Links

[Safiire Arrowny]

I read an article in Phrack about how people could start setting up webpages, with links that are exploits. So say you made a web page with a link to www.blah.com/blah.asp?HHHHHHHHHHHHHH.... something like the code red exploit. Then when the a web indexer etc. comes around it will not only perform the exploit for you, it may end up indexing this expoit for others to find in search results. Although I don't think that google will archive something with a ?HHHHH.. on the end, many bots will probably follow any link they come across. That would be a search engine manipulation if you ask me, although quite different than say googlebombing.

The REAL GOOGLE secret: CONTENT and STRUCTURE

[Anonymous Coward]

Google uses a multi-part ranking schema:

Google does part of their ranking based on the number of links to a site from other sites, BUT they also weight the links based on the overall ranking of the site the links are from: a link to a malaria site from the CDC or WHO carries more weight than 10 links from pages like "My Malaria Facts".

One of their absolute killer ranking techniques, that is easy for anyone to exploit, evaluates the site content based on HTML structure. If you write properly structured HTML, and if your headings include words being searched for, you score higher than a site with the same appearance but elaborate use of FONT tage and fancy layout tricks. (yes, I monitor this, and no I won't tell you where the monitor pages are.)

Good concise pages, full of tightly focused content, with plain HTML links, still work best. (CGI sctipting and fancy authentication schemes lower your rankings).

Re:My guess is that it's a problem with IP numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

...then the following links will be weighted highly because they are on Slashdot, and thus will boost the rankings for the site to which they point for Google searches that contain the words:

Britney Spears Videos and MP3's

Britney Spears Nude

Britney Spears Naked Breasts

Britney Spears Porn

You can help in this experiment by adding these links to Angelfire, Geocities and AOL pages.

Re:My guess is that it's a problem with IP numbers

[mbauser2]

If, indeed, Google is ranking links by IP address then it's a brutally flawed concept to begin with

I didn't say Google is "ranking links by IP", I said it's confusing 2 sites that have occupied the same IP address. In fact, Google is doing all it's normal ranking procedures (text analysis and link analysis), but screwing up the very last step by associating the rank with the wrong URL. Yes, this is a big error, but it's easy to spot: If you click on a Google link, and the site you find is about what Google says it's about, this problem hasn't affected your search.

I actually doubt the problem is entirely Google's fault. Very few people have reported this problem, and whenever I've tried to help them, they turned out to be "strictly end-user" types who couldn't tell me anything useful about their server configuration. Therefore, I haven't been able to exclude the possibility that this Google "error" is prompted by misconfigured web servers.

You would be shocked as some of the silly misconfigurations enacted by commercial web hosting companies. For example:

Apparently a bunch of hosting companies have decided "404 Not Found" errors are obsolete, and started returning "403 Forbidden" responses when browsers/robots requested non-existant files from the web host customers. Unfortunately (for their customers) Googlebot interpreted those respones differently when it comes to robots.txt. "404" meant "no restrictions, come on in", while "403" meant "stay the hell out". So a bunch of customers who didn't know anything about robots.txt (and shouldn't need to) suddenly got their sites kicked from Google, because their hosting company confused Googlebot.

(Google has, in fact, recently changed their policy on 403 errors because of mistakes like this.)

just following the guide!!!

[dark-br]

Trabalhos Prontos

Juiz de Fora IRC Fotos

How slow is Google?

[Anonymous Coward]

So I created a web page for my dad's small helicopter service business: www.dynamicaviationhelicopters.com
That was about two weeks ago. Google still doesn't know that it exists. How long does it usually take for Google to find a web page? What if the web page isn't linked to by anybody else, will it ever be found?