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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."
Are entries rejected from the contest if they are using dubious tactics? It's fairly easy to go about spamming links all over the place with the appropriate link texts and stuff like invisible text, which still aren't adequately detected.
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
I'm sure their techniques will cause google to make such tricks harder in the future. Many of you are familiar with people creating nonsense link pages to drive their own rating up and the various things google put in place to make this harder. Now they need a contest on how to get delisted, I still have a domain name that hasn't been used in 3 years that is in google.
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This is the very first story in the Google topic BTW.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
It surely is a nice project with some very fancy prizes, but has anyone thought of what Google's response is going to be?! Wham! Thanks for telling us the techniques to beat our own system guys - we'll now be altering it so that this is no longer a problem. :S
But I think I ought to raise a problem with Google, which this contest simply serves to underline: Google is too easily gamed. After all, just take a look at what the bloggers have done for the phrase "miserable failure". All it takes is an aggrieved group of a couple of dozen individuals and they can push anything up the ranks of Google. It's not that hard to knock someone's rank down by a bit just by getting a bunch of people to delink them. When Google recaches, their rank falls...
nigritude ultramarine
Are the winners required to share their techniques to claim the prize? Or will the winners themselves end up getting offers in exchance for their services...
Hack the contest. Googlebomb "nigritude ultramarine" to http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/09/184021 7 . That's this article, stripped of all the other crap.
I'm planning on doing it, and I'm not a Google monster, but I'm not a Google slouch either; I have a pretty decent amount of Google juice for a one-man site.
Note that mostly likely, links from Slashdot to Slashdot won't count any, so no point in linking in comments here.
A few of the ads that Google found to be relevant:
Need Search Engine Help?
The Definitive SEO Resource
SeoDesk
Sounds like a conflict of interest to me.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
For instance, and this is just to prove a point, let's say the PageRank formula counts a link from CNN.com and MSNBC.com as equivalent to 1,000 links from any other domain. Obviously if 1,000 Slashdotters place a link to the Slashdot article [which is probably high, I doubt people care enough to take part in your suggestion] but some person gets a link on CNN and MSNBC somehow, that person is going to win. I would guess that gaming the system can beat a raw numbers attempt if it is focused and has enough knowledge of the PageRank formula.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
I used to like hotbot before they got eaten by Lycos. They used Inktomi's engine, which I think MSN licensed for a while.
nlsearch had cool features, but died out. (I think they sell their engine for enterprise use at northernlight.com).
altavista was cool when it was run by DEC (which got ate by Compaq, which was swallowed by HP).
next?
It's gotten to the point that any word beginning with "nig" sounds racist to me. The word niggardly has gotten several people in hot water the last few years.
I am the champion title holder there.
Yay.
The funny thing is I have no idea how I got there.
-- The unsig...
Does the following * user-agent also apply to Google or not? If not, he will indeed get on Google in no time flat.
Of all the random letters and words they could have generated, the use of an "N" "G" "R" word is very wierd. Either these people live in some kind of social and intellectual bubble... (most likely), or else what....?
Here are some words that I wouldn't choose too.
Mithorfickur.... cantlickir... etc.
"nigritude" is just one weird choice. Why would they choose it? It isn't random letters... it has the feel of English.
I think it's a bad choice, since presumably they just want something neutral... but maybe brushing up against words that have negative cultural connotations is how you take a boring nonesense word and make it interesting...
Seems like a really bad choice.... and it is reinforced by the use of a "color" word as the second word... ultramarine is a color, and so this cues the mind to think of color, which, in a different sense, is also implicit in the letters of the first word.
Very odd, and surely a poor choice for the purpose at hand.
Oh, I agree that criticism about the use of the word "niggardly" ("miserly") is pure ignorance... but I also bow to the fact that we live in an ignorant society and I would avoid using it because I wish to communicate and, really, how often do you really need to say "niggardly" to make your point?
You don't, ever, need to use it. And you don't need to choose a word like "nigritude" as a "random" word either. You just don't.
Sounds like you hate *capitalism* not marketing...
..."the marketing scumbags" just like "the sales scumbags" are the ones that make sure that whatever brilliant product you are lucky enough to help make . . . gets sold.
Egad but I wish they had an over-18 rule to post here; one should have at least *some* inkling as to how the world works or, absent that, the knowledge that one has NO inkling as to how the world works.
1.) Do the Google search
/. hordes.
2.) Click on the "Dissatisfied?" link
3.) Complain to Google about all the spammers.
Only you can stamp out spammers.
Show Google the power of the
mediapartners-google is the Google AdSense system, and yahoo-newscrawler must be Yahoo's news system, which might be used by Google, seeing as they get /. news fairly quick.
We've been trying numerous optimizations to win the #1 spot for 'science forums'... but oddly enough we kept losing to sites were often not even directly relevant to the query. Eventually we brought in some optimizations just to the pages of the site to bring things up.
Well, we now have the number one spot... but since we did nothing as far as increasing mentions on the other sites, the question arises how of how much weight Google really puts on external references to your site.
This technique of gaming is also a technique akin to spamming. I maintain a blog on my website www.geofffox.com (I want a higher rank too). It's a small affair averaging 400-500 guests a day, each looking at a few pages. I know that Google results are the single biggest referrer to my site! But sites with no legitimate traction know that Google can work for them too. So, every day or so, I get 'comment spam.' An automated system will hit my site with a comment. The comment, of course, includes his URL. Sometimes the comments are obviously commercial (usually porn or drugs), but often they are socially engineered to blend in. These would include comments like: "I couldn't agree with you more." or "Nice point." Again, these innocuous posts are accompanied by porn or drug URLs. Most of the time they come from Russian IP addresses. Though I don't post those who link to my site, others do... and so I often see what look like referrals in my log, from porn sites. Following the link back shows I wasn't mentioned at all (Let's not talk about my career in adult films). Google rank has become so valuable that these businesses on the margin of legitimacy probably feel they have no other choice if they wish to be found. Damn shame.
As alluded in the "Note to Slashdot Editors" (thought they would prune that), I first want to emphasize I have NO relationships with the folks running this content - I just think it is hilarious, although it will certainly provide some insights into how Google works, and we'll see all sorts of whacky things from the SEO pro's - again, I am not one of 'em.
Second, I hadn't thought about Slashdot ranking 1st for the contest as some have suggested - now that would be a crackup! Unfortunately, Slashdot won't allow you to place in IMG tag in a post (a requirement of the contest is a small image on the page), plus I'm not a member of the SearchGuild, so I'm not elgible ... maybe Cmdr Taco or Timothy need an iPod and/or 17" LCD - go for it! ;-)
Third, you know the folk at Google have gotten wind of this contest, and if I were them, I'd put a link on the main page to their own nigritude ultramarine page. I.e. Google should NOT tinker with their algorithms, but with a link from their PR10 main page, that certainly should shoot 'em up in the rankings. I gotta wonder if the pre-IPO Google would do this - we'll see with the "new" Google ;-)
Fourth, I appreciate some of the comments from folks about my Christmas Lights and the Christmas Webcam with webcontrol (yes, you can turn the lights ON and OFF via the web) which actually been on Slashdot before - in fact, you can read my Slashdot Effect Analysis from last year. I assure you it should be MUCH more interesting this year, as due to some multi-threaded optimizations, I think I'll be able to reduce the throttle from minimum 5-second updates to 1-second updates. I'm going to have to be REALLY NICE to my neighbors, 'cause it will be quite the flickering light show in December/2004 ... although I usually fire it up for a test-run in October as part of my Halloween Decorations and Lights.
alek
P.S. One thing slight off-topic is the Google Compute project which I thought I mention to those Slashdotters with idle CPU time that want to help the Stanford Folding@Home project - this really is a good cause.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If the site looks like news, and has an RSS feed, they put it up quickly. Google News was ignoring FreeInternetPress.com , but once we put up the link for the RSS feeds, they picked us up. Now just about every story we publish gets posted.
And this looks like a good place to tell you about The Nigritude Ultramarine attack submarine. I'd laugh if I even show up in the top 100.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I had (and still have, actually) an accidental top result for "Peter Griffin" in the image search. I never linked to or used the image outside a photoshop contest, and it wasn't even that good - it was the cartoon character Peter Griffin (from Family Guy) with Merv Griffin's face.
After I found out about my top placement, I started watching my log files and I was surprised to see how many messageboards have linked the image. Most of the image linking was pointless - just somebody found the image and linked directly to it, with no explanation of why it was applicable. Weird.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
There is another contest in Spanish. The search term is telendro.
I just couldn't miss the opportunity to join the nigritude ultramarine craze!
It is not the winning that matters it's the participation that gives you the joy!!!
Seriously, though, SEO people showed us once again that the large number of the decentralized groups will always have tactical advantage in the big Goliath's strategic war on spam.
Essentially "Nigritude Ultramarine Challenge" is a bright idea of someone at DarkBlue.com spam-house where for the price of an iPod and 17" Flat Screen LCD they will get lots of publicity, backlinks and a glance at the alternative rank boosting technics from the amateur SEOs from all over the world.
I was expecting that Google will do something of a similar nature, but the spammers did it first. Unless the Google team, famous for its secretiveness, is already working on a Google sponsored activity involving a large group of SEOs dancing to its tune :)
I doubt that any serious "white hat" or "black hat" will participate in the Nigritude contest unless they have too much spare time on their hands and too much spare PR on their pages. Most likely it will be self proclaimed SEO gurus of the young age willing to show off their SEO skills to win the challenge. And, undoubtedly, there will be a few good tricks that will take time for the google engineers to patch and will make some money for the senior SearchGuild members in the mean time.
[And NO - I am not putting a link to the www.seochallenge.com site!]