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How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook
Mr. Christmas Lights continues: "So some folks in the SEO community decided to have a 2 month contest where they made up a nonsense keyword phrase (nigritude ultramarine), and they will award a iPod and a 17" LCD (big spenders, eh?) to whoever ends up #1 in Google a month and two months from now - read more contest details at Dark Blue's SEOChallenge and follow the progress at www.seochallenge.com.
As you can imagine, there will be all sorts of wild web pages out there - for example, take a look at this "optimized" URL for nigritude ultramarine : www.nigritude-ultramarine.com/nigritude-ultramarin e/nigritude-ultramarine.asp and I'm sure there will be plenty of other entertaining entries - you can do a Google Search yourself to see who's currently on top.
Note to Slashdot Editors: I have NOT entered the contest - buncha SEO pro's are involved and a hobbiest (at best) like me (who doesn't stray over to the dark side - I like Google! ;-) would get spanked."
Dark Blue being an advertising agent...surely the techniques of the winner will end up in some sort of ad scheme...
Good. Firstly, it improves the Google results. Secondly, it makes the next competition more challenging. What's the downside?
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
I suppose doing something legitimate... like selling a successful product with this name attached... is out of the question? ;-P
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Still, I'm no fan of the competition this story is about. It's no more or less than a competition to find ways to lessen the usefulness of the Web by giving more power to "spammers" (in the loose sense of the word).
Yeah, that should work. But look at it this way: if I were a betting man on which site "wins" the contest, I betchya that this Slashdot article has a pretty good chance. Many other blogs will post here and to the contest site, and I bet those 2 are in the top 5. Since Slashdot has such a high pagerank to begin with, this Slashdot article might just win the contest. Buggers.
Damn that Heisenberg.
The whole point of a "search engine" from day one was to help connect people with what they are looking for. To that end, the HTML "META" tag was invented, so that you could give keywords relevant to what your page is about.
Enter the marketing scumbags. They just want as many eyeballs to see a page, whether it's relevant or not. And so, in short time, the META tag became completely meaningless. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google ignores the META tag completely.
And so Google started checking links, because if somebody links to some page, it's probably useful.
Cue the marketing scumbags again. Tons of fake pages with fake links, all intended to fool the search engine.
And so they keep trying to find new ways to fuck around with Google and all us people who just want to find what WE want rather than what some marketer wants.
And in typical marketing scumbag fashion, they call this let's-screw-google nonsense "optimization".
God I hate marketers. They're worse scum than lawyers, pimps and pushers IMNSHO.
nigritude ultramarine nigritude ultramarine nigritude ultramarine
The bots *DO* read Slashdot comments, and give preferential treatment to posts that receive high scores. If you don't know how to add anything constructive to a conversation, you probably shouldn't attempt this, because it's a waste of time for yourself and everyone else.
In my own experience, it works like a charm to attract the bots like Google, Slurp, AJ, and the like, however it generally does little to attract actual people who are mostly too wary of potential troll links.
Don't get me wrong, I like getting visited by Google, but I'd prefer real people. I suppose having a site worth visiting wouldn't hurt either... ;-)
I can think of a couple of downsides.
1) They used a _real_ word for the contest. Ultramarine may not be common,
but this will eventually fubar legitimate searches. A random string would
have been a better measure.
2) This is a contest being run by an Ad-Company so that they can glean the
best techniques for getting their ads in the first 3 pages on a Google
search. Nothing more.
-- "It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries." - Thursday Next
Froogle could do with a better interface. More of a grid like pricegrabber, as it is its just hard to read and compare prices.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
We might as well be discussing a rule for eliminating "dubious" entries from a contest for who can pull off the biggest stock fraud scheme.
What comes to mind is a strip of the old comic strip "Ernie". This strip has a running gag about a local group called the "Pirhana club" which has a yearly "Pirhana of the Year" contest which is literally a yearly award to whichever of the members can be the biggest sleazeball.
There's one character in the strip named "Uncle Sid" who wins the contest every year. He's just that much of an asshole.
One year, as the Pirhana of the Year award approached, the strip chronicled various members of the club working overtime to get the award. Sid, though, did nothing, just sitting in the bar, oblivious and drinking while the other members of the club bragged to him about how they were certain to win this year.
And on the strip on the day of the award ceremony, the readers were shown various members of the club around the room, explaining to the person next to them why they're certain they're going to win. A member of the city council brags about demanding kickbacks from an orphanage to retain their funding. A doctor brags about defrauding patients by charging them for surgery he anesthesised them for but did not perform for nonexistent ailments. A used car salesman brags about selling a set of totally nonfunctional cars to a nunnery. And as the announcer calls out "THE WINNER.. IS.. SID", the camera pans to Uncle Sid explaining to Ernie that he stuffed the ballot box.
The next strip simply showed the other lead contenders confronting Sid and demanding to know, "How did you win? What did you do?" And Sid responds, "I cheated. I stuffed the ballot box and bribed the judges."
The disheartened response, after a brief pause was "Damn, you're good."
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The main secret is to search for a certain phrase, and then analyse the top results. This tells you things such as if the phrase boldened up to 3 times in the page helps, but maybe, for example, if it is boldened more than 3 times, it isn't counted so effectively. The title, the META tags, the page, H1-5 tags, bold etc, all count. But you have to work out how many you can put before Google thinks you're just trying to boost your ratings.
That is a load of nonsense. Studying the page in question shows you "on page" factors, and on page factors are only one part of the manner in which google determines results (and very arguable an almost trivial part at that).
You dont need to see why a phrase is in top position at the moment - as there is one factor that trumps all - anchortext (the text used as the link). Competitive phrases like search engine optimization and their allinanchor counterparts demonstrate this quite throughly, for any competitive phrase there is a very high corelation between anchor text and the results. Designing a site to get good search results at the moment involve desiging a site that uses internal links effectively and getting external links to your site - messing with on page factors (for a single page) will get you nowhere.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
Too bad robots.txt disallows indexing of article.pl pages! Link to the shtml page (http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/09/1840217.sht ml?tid=126&tid=217&tid=95) instead:
nigritude ultramarine will help your nigritude get more ultramarine today!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'd have to disagree. From experience, I've noticed that my URL listing at the top of my comments (line immediately above this) allows people to search for my online resume. This URL above in Slashdot is the only place I've ever advertised my online resume.
See for yourself, do a search for "vancouver electrical engineer wireless hardware". The second item there will be me (as of today, anyways). Higher pagerank than the IEEE Communications Society in Vancouver, even.
Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )