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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?"
Remember, search engines now ask for money and they will make sure your page gets to the top of the list.
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?
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
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!
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?
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.
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.
Well, yes, but it's on the fourth results page.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
The relevant bit on one of the Britney Spears pages seems to be:
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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?
Sailing over the event horizon
Of course it still happens. Just ask some opponents of the Church of Scientology.
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.
I have written over 900 book reviews
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..."
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.
You should try this Google search!
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!!!
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
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.
e =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).
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§ion=2&styl
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.
rooooar
Here are some more URLs that might be of interest:
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?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Such an unbelivable display of ignorance on energising the synergies while leveraging the brand-awareness among the propesct client base shouldn't go unpunished.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 ;)
http://www.s4biturbo.com/
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.
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.
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.
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
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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
Slashdot definitely needs a Google icon.
Da Blog
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.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
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."
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
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.
I have written over 900 book reviews
That's exactly what he said he ended up with as a solution, using the mod_rewrite module.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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)
I heard some sites used to fill up their backrounds with words that had a font the same colour as the background.
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.
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!
But what is www.osdn.com/about.shtml doing at number 4 on page 1!
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Reverse outsourcing: it's the future