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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?"
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
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Here's one I use all the time.. just follow these easy steps:
Now, watch your Google ranking rise to the top! IT'S THAT EASY! And you'll laugh all the way to the bank!
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.
Of course it still happens. Just ask some opponents of the Church of Scientology.
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..."
But do a google search for crack/serial/warez.
;p
.de spoofed pr0n pages. Someone figured it out.
For instance. Webcam32 Crack
Yes, I OWN webcam32. So there.
The point is, the first THREE PAGES are
Here are some more URLs that might be of interest:
"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?"
... 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.
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
My point is that providing *real* information helps you *none* in relation to Google rankings.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
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
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
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).