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

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?

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

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?

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!

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.