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

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

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!

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..."

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.

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

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.