A Search Engine Manipulator's Tale

NevDull writes "Well known Search Engine Optimization expert Greg Boser of WebGuerrilla shares how he manipulates search engine results, using simple techniques, with Wired Magazine." From the article: "The search engines live in a fantasy world...Every link is a vote. But people buy and sell links."

Comments

Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[lecithin]

Not too long ago I could do a search on google and actually find something that was usually close to what I wanted. These days I get bogged down on the sites advertising there services and links to ebay.

I dunno. I would really like a search engine that isn't being used to 'spam' me with services that I really am not looking for. I wouldn't mind the ads so much if clicking them got me to the root of what I was searching for to begin with.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[shawn(at)fsu]

I find that I can still do the "I'm feeling lucky" (which just takes you automagicly to the first result) and get what I want, I guess part of that is usinga a descriptive search. Such as lyrics "otherside" for example. I don't think it's too bad yet.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[micromoog]

Just subtract terms from every search to cut out the crap. Compare a search with the same search using these additional keywords:

-buy -price -checkout -sale -shop

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Sheetrock]

The ideal would be to present only advertising that is relevant to you, although the trick of marketing is to figure out how to make anything relevant to you.

While people should be free to do whatever they want with their webpages -- it being the job of the search engine to do the work of sorting -- this tactic of "optimizing for search engines" only has a point if the website is actually indicated in some form in the search topics. Online marketers just don't get that, and seem to figure one pair of eyeballs is as good as another (which they are if you're dealing with CPM ads of course...)

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[badasscat]

Not too long ago I could do a search on google and actually find something that was usually close to what I wanted. These days I get bogged down on the sites advertising there services and links to ebay.

I've noticed this too, and it really is amazing how quickly Google's become nearly useless for most searches. Picking relevant search terms that will cut the crap out has become something of a fine art.

What I have always wished Google would do would be to have an option (even just on their "advanced search" page) that you could separate out e-commerce sites. I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but maybe just a mirror image of Froogle would do the trick. This would seriously cut out about 95% of all the search engine spam, because these sites are always selling you something. If you just want information, Google is almost impossible for a lot of things.

Of course, the other amazing thing is that people continue to use Google over other search engines despite this issue (and it is an issue that goes to the heart of what they do). I haven't used many other search engines lately - are any of them really any better?

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[lecithin]

Yep, you could do that, and I do.

But, if you are looking for something specific that is published, you may not get the results you want.

An example may be that you are looking for information on a nebula. By using the "-" keywords above, you would get rid of places like space.com, skyandtelescope.com, possibly universities and other places that advertise and have subscriptions for their information.

I don't think that taking away keywords is a good answer to me.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also -search because lately I see a lot of "search for foobar2000" links showing up. Some times 3 or 4 links to other search engines will show up in the top 10.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[jschnell01]

There really is no efficient way to hide from the spammers now... as good as any search engine is... once it gains popularity its like sending up the batsignal... or rather... in this sense it would be the spam signal. where there is traffic there will be spam. i dont think there will ever be an effective remedy for that.

LOOK, ITS THE SPAM SIGNAL!!

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[ackthpt]

These days I get bogged down on the sites advertising there services and links to ebay.

Did you really mean Blog Town?

I dunno. I would really like a search engine that isn't being used to 'spam' me with services that I really am not looking for. I wouldn't mind the ads so much if clicking them got me to the root of what I was searching for to begin with.

Maybe Google could offer a subscription service so you don't get the ads they insert, but don't count on it. It would be pretty hard to dodge the ads which present themselves as answers to your search, or other pages which would lead you to sellers.

"If you liked this post, buy my new book!" - Guy With Questionmarks Tattooed On His Bum

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[micromoog]

But the original results for "nebula" were pretty good anyway ;)

Seriously, though, a combination of selectively subtracting "junk" words like these, along with using several keywords to narrow it down, seems to work well. Particularly, enclosing multi-word phrases in quotes makes a HUGE difference sometimes.

It's not perfect, and it is extra effort and annoying when you end up at trash no-content sites, but Google still does a good job for me overall.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[ThosLives]

The ideal would be a world where I go tell people what I want and people showing me they can meet that want rather than a world where people are telling me I want what they are offering. Especially if it is "targeted" because they'll be targeting me with things that I might like but don't really need. Insidious!

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Silver Sloth]

At the end of the day it's all about money. Google may not be bad guys but they're in it for the money. As long as the vast bulk of users go straight to Google they've got no incentive to spend money to refine their search algorythms for the uber techies like yourself.

But that reminds me of another IT name that became the de-facto standard and the response to that was for the uber techies to create their own. Maybe we want/need a Linux type competitor to Google where quality is the driver? If only....

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[NevDull]

The Teoma engine (which powers AskJeeves) produces results that appear to be far better filtered than Google. It also produces fewer results, from a smaller number of total pages, but... depending on the term, it can give quite nice results.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[wbm6k]

Of course, the other amazing thing is that people continue to use Google over other search engines despite this issue [SNIP]. I haven't used many other search engines lately - are any of them really any better?

Of course, the really amazing thing is that you freely admit there is a problem with Google, that it does not do what you want it to, and yet you still haven't checked out the alternatives.

Which shows that it isn't amazing at all; people don't perform a web search these days--they google something. The site has become synonymous with the task, and I suspect it will take a MAJOR problem (on the order of institutionalized censoring by Google) to change that.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[yourfavoritetroll]

yes true this works in certain situations but why should you have to do this additional thing?

i want a search engine to find the real stuff i want and no junk without tweaking and tweaking.

how many users would do the -xyz after coming up with spam sites time and time again? i expect they would just close the search

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Mr. Cancelled]

Alternatively, you could purchase DEVONAgent, which searches many engines, and then integrates the results, removing redundant, and/or unrelated links before presenting you with the results (ordered by relevancy).

No, it's not free, and yes, it's only for the Mac, but it's a good example of how many people are finding the information they need, without getting bogged down in this "My site ranks higher than yours" mentality, which seems to be permeating Google lately. Copernic for the PC used to be free, and did something similar (integrating multiple searches into one set of results), but it lacks the functionality which DEVONAgent brings to the table (and if you're impressed with the Agent app, you should check out DEVONthink - It's one of my fave Mac programs, and ranks right up their with Quicksilver and Delicious Library, as a must-have app!)

I agree with the original poster... Google's results pretty much suck lately. Around November of last year, I began to notice this. Nowadays, it takes much longer to find the needle in that haystack! The 2nd post in this thread is nice (add "-buy, etc"), but it doesn't help if you're actually looking for something to buy.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[rm999]

That's a really good idea. I would like to see something like that built into google (ie. a checkbox next to the seach box along the lines of "filter out commercial sites"). Google could then look for keywords that indicate that they are trying to sell you something and remove the offending pages from the results. This would benefit the user by giving better searches, and benefit google by giving more attention to their own ads. They probably already have the algorithms to do this from froogle.

I personally am starting to get annoyed with how much effort I need to put in to search for information about commercial products on google. The amount of noise in the results can be mind-boggling.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[alecks]

Yeah, that works too

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Tim C]

Try searching for a review of any piece of computer hardware or any consumer electrical goods. The vast majority of hits are to price comparison or ecommerce websites that allow users to add reviews. That wouldn't be so bad, but the vast majority of them don't have user reviews of the stuff I'm looking for.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Tim C]

You can do that (and I do), but the last time I checked google only allowed up to 10 keywords. You've used up 5 before you've even put in any that actually relate to the thing you're searching for. Depending on the nature of your search, it can be frustrating trading off "positive" search terms and "negative" ones.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[gl4ss]

couple of years back(2? or so) I did an experiement.. I was looking for some stuff on the internet back then*cough*mame roms*cough* that couldn't be found easily, pretty much all the sites that came up were part of one linkfarm or another.

what I noticed back then was that you could filter a lot of sites out at once as the guys running the farms used the same advertisement referral id's on multiple pages. though, it was not feasible since the blacklist would have needed to be WAY much bigger than what google allows the query to be. anyways, long story short, I coded a program in java that used googleapi to do the search and then proceed to score the results according to a plus and a minus wordlist. pretty simple really and actually was effective in weeding out the linkfarms after manually feeding enough words from the linkfarms to the minus list, the positive score giving list I populated with relevant information and stuff that would probably, but not necessarely, mean that it was a page I was looking for(words like "ftp://").

pretty effective but rather slow process. I just wish google would offer (maybe as a service?) a scoring system like that, which would be usable with huge wordlists.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[thedustbustr]

Didn't Yoda say that?

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Cap'n Steve]

Add the pay-per-click search sites frequently used by domain squatters and you pretty much have a list of everything that's wrong with Google.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[recursiv]

Well then, it sounds like you need to check again.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[WhiteBandit]

You can do that (and I do), but the last time I checked google only allowed up to 10 keywords. You've used up 5 before you've even put in any that actually relate to the thing you're searching for. Depending on the nature of your search, it can be frustrating trading off "positive" search terms and "negative" ones.

Google recently raised their query limit to 32 words.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Y2]

Maybe my searching techniques have co-evolved together with the search-jammers' techniques, but I generally get prettty good results. The most notable except is for hotels. No matter how specific my search terms are, the one hotel I may be looking for comes on page 3 or later. The top 20 spots all go to packagers fronting for a zillion hotels.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Storlek]

Maybe we want/need a Linux type competitor to Google where quality is the driver? If only....

What, like Nutch?

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Yomers]

Check other search engines. IMHO msn.com is really useful lately (yeah, i know ;), yahoo for some queries. I've made a site that let you search same query in different SE's - tadam! MeTaSearch.INternet It's in development, suggestions are welcome.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.. those were the days! When u look for free pr0n u would get free pr0n.

Now, with all the "web rings" and co-marketing techniques that pr0n sites use, each linking the other and using the word "free" all of them in unison, how in the world can i quickly find genuinely free pr0n !!!

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Yomers]

forgot the link - http://mts.in/

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[AxelBoldt]

Everything in .com that's visible to google is crap. So simply add "-.com" to your google searches.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[urlgrey]

Amen, brother. (Errr... sister... well, nevermind that part for now. Just: AMEN!)

I've been saying for a while now that ask.com / teoma has an excellent search offering. It's funny how frequently I find myself liking what they're doing with search and nodding my head.

Supposedly Google has just recently hired one of the main people behind the Teoma algos.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[NevDull]

It's just unfortunate how little traffic they have. I have a #1 result for a term on AskJeeves, and it sends me less traffic than #72 for that term on Google.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[pipingguy]

Teoma's fine with me - it ranks my site at #1 for the appropriate keywords, as does Google.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Jewelry Mall]

I use search engines constantly in my work as a Senior Unix admin. The search engine technique that works best for me is choosing search terms wisely. Think of several unique words that will describe your problem.

For example, if you are trying to debug why your machine is not booting up, use the EXACT error message as well as the OS name and version. Generally, this will give you an answer in the first 5 links.

If you are looking for song lyrics, type in the FULL title as well as performer. This seems to work 100% of the time for me.

I have found multi-word queries work best. Yes, subtract words that don't work -- but generally, search works 99% of the time for me on the first try because I am willing to be specific on what I am looking for.

Lorraine
Jewelry Mall

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[antiMStroll]

That's completely backwards. "Google" became a common use word for Internet search and achieved its overwhelming dominance precisely because it offered honest search results without hidden 'placements'. Few even remember the gold standards before Google came on the scene, names like Altavista and.....? Saying Google has no incentive to retain the characteristics which made it number 1 makes little sense.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[papaindahouse]

http://tramadol.nitpickit.com/tramadol.html

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[yyttrrre]

I normally append the search with -shopping -store -buy -sale. Then I look for common words in the results I don't like and minus them out also until I get a page of relevant results. Takes a few trys but it usualy works.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[MidnightBrewer]

The link to Nutch shows a site that hasn't been updated in two years and doesn't have a public demo, either. So if that's the "Linux-like" answer to Google, I don't think it's presenting the image you were hoping for.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[cagliost]

You could have skipped that and gone straight to the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula.

I use Wikipedia first, Google second.

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Storlek]

Oh, sorry, try this.

It is a bit unfortunate that Nutch hasn't received as much attention as it really should, but writing a search engine from scratch is a pretty complex task, especially one that's capable of competing with something like Google.

Think about this: to be effective, a search engine needs to download, basically, the entire Internet. This implies a need for an enormous amount of bandwidth, which translates to lots and lots of money. Where will a little open-source search engine get all this money for all this bandwidth? That's an issue that needs to be addressed before anything like Nutch can work.

Another issue that has to be resolved before an open-source search engine can take off: the development model just doesn't sync up with the way search engines work. You have to keep a big central database somewhere of all the pages the robot has indexed. J. Random Hacker can't just download the source code, hack at it, build it, and try it out at home without access to this database. (Okay, technically he could, but it wouldn't be able to do anything useful.)

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Anonymous Coward]

sites advertising there services

"their".

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add -https, -amazon, -paypal, -ebay to that list and 'kill' pages with (or lead to) secure (likely e-commerce) links in them. It seems to work a bit....

For "ranma" google returns 1,090,000 pages

For "ranma -https -amazon" google returns 632,000 pages

It looks like the other 458,000 pages mentioning Ranma (of anime fame) were ultimately trying to get you to buy something as well....

Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now?

[Merk]

Yay. Advice on how to avoid advertising in a post containing an obtrusive link to an e-commerce site.

Even with .sigs turned off, people insist on plugging their pages at the bottom of their posts.

How about a "good info, annoying post" moderation?

Call these people by their real titles please

[Anonymous Coward]

they are not
Search Engine Optimization experts

they are
Search Engine Spammers

and they are just polluting the search engine, remember if your searches cease to be relavent then those customers they are seeking will just go elsewhere

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[shawn(at)fsu]

just a though. In the article one company gurentees top 10 placement, what if 11 companies all selling the same product use their spammi... Optimazation service?

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[micromoog]

You mean a shady, fly-by-night business specializing in deception may not be able to deliver on promises? I'm shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[KillerDeathRobot]

This guy is anyway. There's nothing wrong with white hat tactics to get your page to rank well. There are lots of times people are searching Google and really do want product results.

On the other hand, scumbags like this guy are definitely, as you say, search engine spammers.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[shawn(at)fsu]

Wow that scary I totaly forgot about how shisty internet business can be. Good thing I didn't get any spam emails to increase my, well you know.
Thanks /walks away with his head hanging down

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[micromoog]

There's nothing wrong with white hat tactics to get your page to rank well. There are lots of times people are searching Google and really do want product results.

There's a line, and if you're doing anything besides adding appropriate and relevant words to your site, you've probably crossed it.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[hackstraw]

There are lots of times people are searching Google and really do want product results.

That is what froogle is for. Google is for searching, froogle is for searching for something to buy.

I do not mind having google provide searches for products. Its very handy, but it has gotten difficult to get good search results lately because of all of the people trying to sell me crap.

I would also like to see google integrate accurate customer feedback on stores on the web like many other sites do. That would be an icing on the cake.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[Anonymous Coward]

Its more than just choosing the right words. The entire site design could be google unfriendly.

For example dyanamic pages with php can be google unfriendly, frames are very google unfriendly (especially Iframes). CSS layouts seem to do better as google ingores the css and just see's some nice clean text. Also, you have to remember to use plain text links (google doesn't like image links). It also helps to use alt tags on your images.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[rcamera]

your sig: 500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig

it was me. i'd like my reward please.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[Serggod]

this is link spamming dovehouseinc.com+resume+writing+service+tips+help+ office+supplies see it's easy!

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[cyberformer]

Froogle is still in beta, and it doesn't work too well. (Retailers can add arbitrary shipping charges, for example, making price comparisons impossible.) Still, that ought to be fixed eventually. I hope that Google will take e-commerce sites out of the main Web search once Froogle is officially launched, or at least give people an easy way to filter them. (They could do the same with blogs.)

Preventing sales pages from spamming search reuslts is is also in Google's interest: As well as driving people away, it also has a direct financial impact on them, because the money paid to the "optimizers" might otherwise be spent on buying text ads.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[Anonymous Coward]

I see why you are in fsu. Get a spell checker.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[Kirth]

Yeah, what a moron: "Boser defines search engine spam as any site that ranks above his". Unbelieveable.

I don't look for shopping sites on the internet. If I do shop, I know the sites very well, tuxgames for instance, or my favourite armourers (jep, plate armour); so any shop that turns up when I search for something is basically irrelevant.

I want information, content, nothing else. As reliable and scientific/technical as possible.

Re:Call these people by their real titles please

[Anonymous Coward]

afaict google will happilly index dynamic content unless explicitly told not to by robots.txt

hell with something like wikipedia its hard to tell that it even *IS* dynamic content

the main problem with frames is that you get taken directly to pages that should be seen in the context of a frameset. This could probablly be got around with some javascript though.

On no

[suso]

Another method is link spam, aka "blog comment spam," in which automated bots plaster ads with return links on the comments pages of blogs.

Oh no! I've been exposed. The light! The light! Ahhhhh!

Seriously though, I didn't realize how well this worked until now. Just by posting to slashdot with my signature, I've managed to go to the top of google if you search for "website/email hosting". Impressive. Doing this wasn't my goal however, I was just trying to get some slashdotter's attention. *blushes*

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps you'd appreciate this then too. HOT GAY COCK

Re:On no

[MyLongNickName]

Unless I am mistaken, your sig is not picked up by Google. Sorry.

Re:On no

[suso]

Thanks a lot.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

That gave me a good laugh. I'd mod this as funny if I could.

Re:On no

[suso]

Actually, you're right. I forgot that non-login accounts don't see signatures here. It must be from another forum that I have that sig on then (like gentoo forums)

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be mistaken. It works for me. Did you enclose the search terms in quotation marks?

Re:On no

[MalaclypseTheYounger]

That is the funniest fucking thing I've seen on here in a long, long time.... KUDOS, Anonymous Coward!

Re:On no

[WormholeFiend]

It's a good think you fixed the typo in:

no disk quotas

Re:On no

[MyLongNickName]

You miss the point. His link did not get to the top through his sig (which you can't see either since you are not logged in). His sig is invisible to those who are not logged in (like Google's search engine). It got to the top through other sources.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

no problem you dick slurping manwhore.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad there is too much competition for this phase:) If this is the first thing pop-up in your head you are probably not alone.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you're right. I forgot that non-login accounts don't see signatures here. It must be from another forum that I have that sig on then

Maybe your service just has hundreds of honest and true fanboys! They love your service so much, they link to your site!

Re:On no

[QuantumRiff]

but hot gay cock will show up to google.. He might be getting some really interesting customers for his web hosting soon.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's intended to pop up in your head.

Re:On no

[MyLongNickName]

Unforunately, he will need a few million more of these suckers (no pun intended) before he shows up on the list. Perhaps a better one would have been hot albino gay cock. Much less likely someone will look up based on this, but much more likely he will float to the top.

Re:On no

[Jurph]

So, how well is that working out for ya?

--

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

not in mine for sure.

Re:On no

[Anonymous Coward]

let's not lose focus on the HOT GAY COCK [suso.org]

Funny, this used to be funny just 2 comments ago!

Re:On no

[BroadwayBlue]

My high ID probably gives me away, but thank you much for this comment. I was wondering where in the heck all the sigs were coming from; after reading as an AC for over 3 years I finally signed-up a week ago.

Thank you much as your comment prompted me to find the "hide sigs" preference. :)

Re:On no

[Tony Hoyle]

Then there's referrer spam - I host a low hit blog (only really used for product version announcements) and 90% of the hits are from dodgy websites selling fake prescription drugs and (for some reason) german hotel and ticket reservations.

Also wiki spam - you can't host a wiki any more without bots adding hundreds of spam links onto the pages (I gave up and locked it down for editing - I was having to clean up the crap several times a day).

Re:On no

[IpSo_]

I used to work in the large hosting business, and the gay porn sites were usually premium customers to have. The running joke around the office was if we ever wanted to make quick cash, it would be to get in the gay porn business.

You wouldn't believe how much traffic they push, and the money they are willing to spend on servers.

Of course, the problem was always if they called support and complained that their images weren't showing up...

God bless Lynx. ;)

Re:On no

[Jason O'Neil]

While I don't deny the impact having your link in your slashdot sig must have, could the (sort of) invisible text on your web page have something to do with it? I'm pretty sure that's something google doesn't approve of. Even though it is just using a white text colour on a white background, the same applies. You're just using as many keywords as you can on the homepage, and you can't think of how to get them all in your actual content, so you just make it so the user doesn't notice. After realising that, I became significantly less interested in your site.

search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

What a miserable failure!

Misleading

[duffer_01]

I read this article and I thought it was somewhat misleading. Although there were places where it mentioned that Link Exchanges could be bad. It gave me the impression that the more the better.

There is a really good site http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
that tries to explain exactly how bad these link exchanges can be (at least from the Google perspective).

Re:Misleading

[timeOday]

The article is also one-sided, because they talk about what spammers do without interviewing anybody from a search engine to see how they fight back. At a colloquium I asked David Cohn, google's director of search results, how much they worried about Microsoft, and he said they worry more about spammers. His job, and of those who work for him, is to fight in this arms race.

That doesn't mean google is winning or will win, but search engines are not static targets like this article implies. People talk about PageRank as if it were really how google works. I'm sure PageRank is still in there somewhere, but I strongly suspect it's only part of the overall technique, buried under layers of tweaks and countermeasures to combat spammers.

You have to remember who this Greg Boser is. When he talks as if he has web search wrapped around his little finger, it's partly because that's what he is - an advertiser, a spammer, a liar. I doubt there was ever a spammer or real-estate agent born that didn't brag about how much money they make, regardless of whether they do.

Not quite that easy.

[bigtallmofo]

I read this article yesterday and found it very interesting but a little simplistic and light on details. Greg Boser appears to make repeated claims that getting top billing in the search engines is easy, but he doesn't point out that for any particular search engine term, there are thousands of people attempting to get top ranking. Even though the basic concepts are easy, when you have thousands of people competing for limited resources, the task is still going to be difficult.

As for his claim of buying and selling links - a quick search on Google for "buy links" verifies that is very true. Sites such as LinkAdage act as EBay-style auctions for links on sites of various pagerank, various Free-For-All sites allow you to post your links for free for a certain period of time and of course Blog-spamming.

Re:Not quite that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

and of course Blog-spamming.

You mean like this:

Be smart about your car insurance [insurancegenius.com]

Re:Not quite that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blog-spamming

Be smart about your car insurance

Which is worse, being a spammer or being a hypocrite? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:Not quite that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think posting a relevant comment and having a signature at the bottom is blog spamming, you haven't seen blog spamming! A blog spammer would've posted "Cialis! Cialis! Cialis! Cialis! Cialis! Cialis! Cialis! Get your Cialis! here! www.erectiledysfunction.com"

Re:Not quite that easy.

[voma]

As for his claim of buying and selling links - a quick search on Google for "buy links" verifies that is very true. Sites such as LinkAdage act as EBay-style auctions for links on sites of various pagerank, various Free-For-All sites allow you to post your links for free for a certain period of time and of course Blog-spamming.

Google says they often identify these "link farms" and drop you from search results if you appear in one. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a big risk to take.

-Voma
--
Volunteer and Non-profit jobs:
www.igc.org/jobs.html

Re:Not quite that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Six of one, half-dozen of another.

Re:Not quite that easy.

[bigtallmofo]

Nobody besides Google insiders know exactly what they do, but I've heard the same thing. I'm not sure I believe it though for the simple reason that:

Competitor A is #1 for "widgets"
Unscrupulous Competitor B is #2 for "widgets"

Being unscrupulous and wanting the #1 position, Competitor B submits Competitor A's site to various link farms.

If that did penalize a site, I think we'd be hearing about it happening all the time.

Re:Not quite that easy.

[glitch!]

Google says they often identify these "link farms" and drop you from search results if you appear in one. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a big risk to take.

So what I need to do is to put my competitor's links there, right?

Re:Not quite that easy.

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't have a blog that you've worked hard on come under attack by blog spammers. It ruins the entire blog. Please don't throw the "blog-spammer" name around because when you dilute it like that it becomes meaningless. Fortunately we don't have to deal with this problem on Slashdot because true spammers are moderated into nothingness.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Where exactly is manipulation involved in that link? I can't see any.

No mention of link exchanges, actually.

[bigtallmofo]

He didn't mention link exchanges in the article - merely link buying. You're absolutely correct that with PageRank algorithms that have been around for years that exchanging links actually hurt your results.

Buying a link for cash on the other hand can help you greatly especially if you're buying that link on a PR6 or higher site.

Re:No mention of link exchanges, actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you maintain the illusion that your line of business is doing some degree of good for the world, or have you just resigned yourself to skimming cash at the direct expense of everyone else?

Re:No mention of link exchanges, actually.

[WillerZ]

Yes, he did, I distinctly remember it. It may of course have been on page 2.

Re:No mention of link exchanges, actually.

[duffer_01]

The line I was refeering to was this one: "Barring that, 5,000 links from cheesy guest books, online diaries, blogs, zany products, porn sites and anyone who honors link exchanges might do the trick."

Maybe it was just me but this seemed to give the reader that link exchanges with 5,000 of these questionable sites would help you. I don't think this is necessarily true.

I'm as much a google fanboy as anyone...

[Kimos]

... but this is getting silly! Still interesting, but kinda silly.

Good old googledot.

Relevance of Google Search Results

[iBod]

Does anyone else find that Google's results are being degraded and becoming less relevant?

They seem to favor large sites over small ones, regardless of content, and consistenty rank SEO spammed pages over clean ones.

Re:Relevance of Google Search Results

[Anonymous Coward]

...and consistenty rank SEO spammed pages over clean ones.

Hmmm...How could this be?

Re:Relevance of Google Search Results

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell yes!
I've been bitchin about this for years and all the /. morrons keep spouting you just don't know how to search.
The only good search engine is a new search engine.
I'll use Tehoma till Tehoma sucks, then I'll find the next most useful search engine.
P.S. Tehoma is already starting to suck.

Re:Relevance of Google Search Results

[crivens]

As Google grows it becomes more about money and anything else, which automatically means that larger companies will win as they have more money.

Hmmm

Re:Relevance of Google Search Results

[ssk77077]

Over the last year, Google's results have become less useful for me.

Re:Relevance of Google Search Results

[pipingguy]

Really?

pipingdesign.com has been #1 with Google for a few years despite ASME, well-funded corporate sites and competing sites that are selling stuff.

Was it just me...

[thirteenVA]

Or did anyone else find that article to be useless. Way to state the obvious...

I think we all knew that back links and keyword rich text help our placement in google. What exactly has this 'expert' shared with us?

Paying a professional to perform SEO for you seems to be fruitless. If you've been in the web development game for long you already know most of the legitimate techniques to help improve your placement. Seems like the SEO industry is a bit of a sham.

Re:Was it just me...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

It was just another way for him to increase his visibility, and for his company too.

He manipulated Wired and used them to "optimize" search engines, while preaching to them about search engine optimization. It's quite brilliant really.

Re:Was it just me...

[thirteenVA]

While this is likely true, the article does not appear to link to his company site and only seems to mention the name once.

Re:Was it just me...

[WebHostingGuy]

Yeah, but Wired has enough readers to make it worth his time to do it. (Although I agree, this is SEO 101 or maybe SEO 90). For good SEO information about google check out www.webmasterworld.com. They have a in depth discussion about SEO and Google.

Yes, indeed

[WillerZ]

And people have been known to buy and sell votes before. I do not see why anyone is surprised that this has happened.

As soon as you have a process which is advantageous to a party if it comes out a certain way they will seek to influence the outcome in that direction. It happens that in this case the process is well-understood, and has an obvious manipulation strategy.

Frankly, I would be shocked and surprised if this type of thing didn't happen.

Uncritical

[slavemowgli]

Whatever happened to critical journalism? This guy isn't a "search engine optimization expert", he's a spammer trying to make some fast bucks by essentially denying (or attempting to deny, at least) the service search engines provide. He's not a single bit better than those spammers who send me 300-400 email messages a day (yes, I do get that many, these days), or the spammers that have flooded newsgroups I used to follow years ago with similar amounts of spam and essentially killed them completely (when a group gets 50 times as much spam as it does on-topic messages, it doesn't take long for all the regulars to leave for greener pastures).

He's nothing but a parasite, and that's exactly what you should call him.

Re:Uncritical

[Anonymous Coward]

spammers who send me 300-400 email messages a day (yes, I do get that many, these days)

dude, that's insane. take some basic precautions.

Re:Uncritical

[Lord_Dweomer]

Um.....because they wouldn't have been able to get an interview with him EVER if they called him what he really was and were more critical. Would YOU go get interviewed by Wired if you knew they were just going to attack you?

Content based ranking

[Jovian_Storm]

Link based ranking might have worked once upon a time, but for truly relevant results, the search has to primarily focus on page content and analyze it. Current link-based ranking means that the search engine is relying on what other websites (and indirectly, webmasters) think of the site in question.

Re:Content based ranking

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. However, I'd bet that manipulating a website analysis algorithm is easier than PageRank (or at least would be for the first couple of generations of algorithms).

I've waded in this industry..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Optimizing" your website is now just double speak for abusing the search engines as liberally as possible.

Wikispam, blogspam, doorway pages, gateway pages, links bought and sold by Google PR ranking, cloaking, and any other techniques that don't consist of just desgining a good web page.

When Google first created its system, it worked well because the internet wasn't as filled with people trying to manipulate the results. Now usually 5 of the top 10 results are just some commercial venture to take advantage of a keyword.

Guys like this jerk are the ones who are ruining search engines.

Re:I've waded in this industry..

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't blame the people. Search engine companies need to innovate to prevent this stuff. It's wishful thinking to think it'll just go away.

Re:I've waded in this industry..

[jonadab]

> When Google first created its system, it worked well because the
> internet wasn't as filled with people trying to manipulate the results.

No, that's the thing: it was and they were, but the techniques that had been developed to do so up to that point did not work so well with Google, because
Google's type of ranking was different from the search engines that came before.

I think it's amazing that it took as long as it did for them to work out the
systems that they have. Even now, Google is *still* harder for them to
manipulate than AltaVista was before Google came around. (Okay, so it's
easy to manipulate the results for a strange combination of obscure words
that nobody normally puts together (e.g., nigritude ultramarine), but that's
mostly because there are no naturally-good results for such searches. You
just *try* to get your blog to come up first for "generic viagra".)

However, Google can't afford to be complacent; they need to actively work on
their ranking algorithms and improve/adjust them continually, to prevent the
SEO people from ever fully catching up.

I like to confuse the search engines

[Timesprout]

By putting my servers in different positions in the server room a couple of times a week

Re:I like to confuse the search engines

[tygt]

Reminds me of chair sex. I don't remember the link to the orignal, but here's an absolutely hilarious movie with chairs: http://paul.binarycore.net/fp/roofsex/roofsex.mov

Re:I like to confuse the search engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that bad fung shui?

search engine spam

[bdigit]

I think what google is really needing is a way to filter out all these spam links in their search results. I hate searching for something and then i have to skip the first 3 pages because I will click on a link and it will be some spam portal page or some other site that has copied wikipedia and thrown in a bazillion ads.

Re:search engine spam

[Shotgun]

I agree. Since I personally have looked to Google as my own personal card catalogue for the past 5yrs or so, I get very upset that these morons are breaking it. Let's put the best Slashdot minds together and offer Google suggestions on how to improve the results we get. Most of the suggestions will probably be implemented already, or worthless, but to get at diamonds you have to turn a lot of dirt.

I'll go first:

- ignore all but the first three or four meta-tags, with the reasoning that someone selling computers won't also be selling the blue pills

- ignore/downgrade sites that link to more than three or four different subject matters, same reasoning as above. If the site isn't targetted, then it is very unlikely that the link is.

-DDoS anyone appearing in the top 10 for a search on SEO

google.slashdot.org?

[OlivierB]

Another Google related story?? This is probably the 4th in just two days!!
I'm thinking about editing my preferences NOT to show anything related to Google anymore.
Enough is enough.
Somebody plese fork Slashdot to Googledot or google.slashdot.org

Re:google.slashdot.org?

[jay-be-em]

Coming from the man with a gmail invite offer in his .sig

Re:google.slashdot.org?

[DeathFlame]

Let's ignore the fact this was not only about google, and assume it is...

So would you also say to [insert your news source here] "Quit doing stories on the Election , I've heard enough", or "I only cared about the war for 3 stories, who the fuck cares now? 4 is just too many"

If you don't want to read the google stories, don't read them. News is news, no matter what it is about.

Re:google.slashdot.org?

[SmokeHalo]

Well, he does have a point. There are a good dozen or so stories just with 'Google' in the title that have been submitted in the last ten days. It seems like Google should just go ahead and buy Slashdot. Call it Slaggle or something.

OTOH, I'm kinda starting to warm up to the word. Google. Google. It's a little silly and makes me want to giggle. Giggle for Google.

Please shoot me.

Re:google.slashdot.org?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus you don't need the invites anymore. You can just follow the link on the main page to get one straight up.

Again, the line between slime and genius blurs

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

You can't help but respect someone who knows what they want - a spike in the wheel of something designed to be useful.

One is reminded of the story of the engineer who wrote a bill to a railroad out for $1000 (when it meant something) for a hammer tap that started a train. "The bill is for knowing where to tap."

This man has found a place to tap that sends the train where he wants, good luck to him.

And an incredible good time in the fires of Hades.

Re:Again, the line between slime and genius blurs

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhmm.

WAAAHHHHHHH!

Poor baby Slashdotter. Go play your xbox and drink your juicebox you petulant little bitch.

NerdBot.

Re:Again, the line between slime and genius blurs

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was an assassin being paid to kill you, would you still wish me luck for knowing that I wanted money?

Re:Again, the line between slime and genius blurs

[Anonymous Coward]

NerdBot? you seem to be talking about yourself again AC...

Every link?

[Chetchez]

Every link is a vote.
People buy and sell links.

Does that imply that people buy and sell votes?
If so, this is not new news.

lets test his theory..

[Mark19960]

some craft /.er set up a website, and lets all link to it.

if we see it at the top, then we know its true.
it all really does sound plausible.
I think we should try it out.

Re:lets test his theory..

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, trying it out now: huge cock

Re:lets test his theory..

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong url. It should be the one from this post.

Re:lets test his theory..

[MyIS]

if we see it at the top, then we know its true

Yeah let's do this: Slashdot.

nip it in the bud

[temojen]

Make sure your blog comment software adds rel="nofollow" to all user-submitted links that you've not approved. Then google (and probably others) will ignore the link.

Re:nip it in the bud

[Yomers]

Currently some blogs have a nice PageRank, with ref nofollow PR of all blogs will be considerably lowered (cose blogs PR comes mainly from interlinking in blog comments) - so this ref nofollow stuff is a 'trojan' present from google to bloggers, shotgun that will let bloggers shot themselves in a foot.

Re:nip it in the bud

[temojen]

so don't "nofollow" legitimate links from your own blog, just the ones in unreviewed user comments.

if he is so good at it

[Anonymous Coward]

then why is when you search google:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=search+engine+optimizer
why isn't he listed ?

Re:if he is so good at it

[LocoMan]

From TFA:

Although many potential customers might wonder how good a company is if it can't rank near the top with its own term, Boser says he wouldn't want to show up high in search engine optimization as a keyword. It gives your company too much visibility (Read: makes it a bigger target.)

Use nofollow!

[sho222]

Back in January Slashdot ran an article on the rel=nofollow attribute that will prevent Google (and MSN and Yahoo, probably others) from indexing the link in anchor tags that contain it. This is meant to cut out the motivation for Blog and Message Board comment spamming.

For all of you out there creating blog/board software and maintaining blog sites, please use this attribute! (/. inlcluded, I suppose)

... of course, you'll have to put a notice somewhere on your site that the links in comments will be ignored by search indexers so the message board spammers know their efforts are futile on your site.

Re:Use nofollow!

[MaufTarkie]

For all of you out there creating blog/board software and maintaining blog sites, please use this attribute! (/. inlcluded, I suppose)

Slashdot started using it earlier this week, but it's seemingly inconsistant. Some links (like yours) has it. Others don't.

I know of this because I changed my userContent.css and now half the outgoing links are crossed out.

Apparently, my link is, too. Perhaps only subscribers can have non-norel links?

Re:Use nofollow!

[hankwang]

Slashdot started using [rel=nofollow] earlier this week, but it's seemingly inconsistant. Some links (like yours) has it. Others don't.

It seems that people with a karma bonus don't get the nofollow tag. You seem to have aquired your Karma bonus recently, so no more nofollow for you either.

(Men länken med hätten funkar inte! Det är hursomhelst meningslöst!)

Re:Use nofollow!

[MaufTarkie]

Ah. That makes more sense than my theory. When I previewed my comment, it had norel. When I posted it, the norel went away. Interesting.

Sadly, he's right - page ranking is easy to fake

[WillAffleckUW]

Back when the national NOW website was just getting started, most of the time when you used Yahoo or Google to search, most people came up with pages for my WA NOW website and our underlying pages, because I coded them to show up high on keywords and links.

Naturally, I provided links back to them, but since we had been on the web before they were, and were responsible for forcing them onto the web in the first place, it wasn't surprising. Their webperson now was part of the three state chapters that forced them to get a web presence, and she knows all about how to get good page rankings - so this is no longer the case, especially since I don't spend much time on the site anymore.

Moved away from google completely

[Anonymous Coward]

I've moved away from google completely.

Their search engine has degraded significantly in the last two years and they have stopped innovating on that particular technogoly. Google news beta sucks ass. (Yes, I know it's beta, but development (read: fixing of grave grave bugs) is sooooo slow). GMail has that whole "You can only join if you're leet enough to get an invitation" thing going for it, plus they've greatly overdone the exclusiveness thing too. Besides, webmail is soooo 1999.

I'm not predicting google's downfall, but you can only get so far on Really Really Shiny Technology.

Miserable failure...

[tka]

This just reminds me of a <a href="http://www.google.fi/search?q=miserable+fai<nobr>l<wbr></wbr></nobr> ure">miserable failure</a>.

Re:Miserable failure...

[Anonymous Coward]

George W. Bush is a miserable failure.

Re:Miserable failure...

[Storlek]

Ow! My irony gland just exploded.

Re:Miserable failure...

[tka]

I thought it was bit funny too... :)

Servers, beware!

[game kid]

You can be moved around your rooms.

You can be wheeled to a vault.

You can hide in Faraday cages and curl under tin foil blankets, disconnected from all forms of Gigabit Ethernet.

But wherever you go, you won't escape the clutches of... GOOGLEBOTS! (B-movie horror music plays in background)

My Experience

[DanielMarkham]

I have a new website. I've also been paying for marketing.

I found I got almost as much traffic this month when I put my website in my slashdot profile! Way to go Slashdot!

For all of the trickery and such, I think that promoting your site or idea is just going to boil down to old-fashioned guerilla marketing. Once the search engines become polluted, people are going to start looking for valuable _content_, and then from there going to a site to purcahse things. It's basically what Google is supposed to do -- use web pages as a "virtual" referral tool. Only this has the benefit of not being amenable to spamming.

Re:My Experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw your website two weeks from now, while searching for hot albino gay cock. Good job!

Re:My Experience

[SamSim]

In my experience, which is limited, I will admit, advertising in your sig on /. is remarkably effective if you can consistently get modded to +5. Particularly in polls.

Re:My Experience

[mike.newton]

I found I got almost as much traffic this month when I put my website in my slashdot profile! Way to go Slashdot!


That's just because the URL is so long and confusing, the /. crowd just sees 'asses' and clicks on it.

Re:My Experience

[tf23]

Once the search engines become polluted, people are going to start looking for valuable _content_

But isn't that the dilemma. As the search engines become more polluted, it's more difficult for people to use the SE, and the results the SE returns just aren't what they used to be. So finding the sites with the good _content_ becomes more difficult to do.

Re:My Experience

[DanielMarkham]

I think we agree.

From the site promoter side, rigging search engines is a no-win proposition. SEs become more junk, people go places they don't want to be, etc. So the only solution, imo, is to create valuable content -- but to create that content elsewhere, on trusted sites. Then link from there into your site.

From the searcher's side, they are already going to trusted sites with material that they are interested in (such as slashdot). My point was having this "content-based referral" seems like the only way for the two to hook up reliably. The whole concept of search words is just too easy to mess around with, especially when you're dealing with the entire web.

No, not really.

[jfengel]

Perhaps you and I are searching for different things. I'm looking through my history at the last dozen or so requests to Google and in each case I found what I was looking for on the first page, often right at the top.

What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".

Kind of a diverse set of things, but they were rather specific. Often I'm looking for trivia, or a particular product. A little bit of convenient specificity and I find what I want. Perhaps the search-engine spammers aren't trying to spam the highly random stuff I'm looking for.

It doesn't always work, and I've been rebuffed in the past. But I use google two dozen times a day and I almost always get what I need.

Re:No, not really.

[iBod]

I use Google a lot more than two dozen times a day (admittedly for somewhat less esoteric subjects than yourself) and from my perspective the quality of results has definitely degraded.

Re:No, not really.

[temojen]

I often google for technical information, and I find it's useful to put the relevant standards organization first ie "w3c CSS table-cell" otherwise ("CSS table-cell") you get oodles of hits to junk sites like w3schools.

Re:No, not really.

[iBod]

Yeah good tip, but often I need (or my customers need) to Google for non-tech info.

For the stuff that most people Google for, the SERPS are becoming flooded with total crap.

Re:No, not really.

[micromoog]

What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".

That was a rare (and frightening!) look inside someone else's brain. Thank you.

Re:No, not really.

[jfengel]

A brief explanation: in 1994 Oprah Winfry ran a marathon. A subsequent issue of Runner's World had an article on her. It had a photo of her, and humiliatingly, me. Humiliatingly, because I was behind her, and I looked like I had died three miles back. That was at mile 23; three miles later she beat me by six minutes.

I had saved the picture but didn't remember what issue it was. But I knew she was on the cover. The answer came on a page of past Runner's World covers.

I suspect I'm making this more scary rather than less. But damn, I'm beginning to forget how we knew anything before there was Google.

Re:No, not really.

[Storlek]

Strange...

The first result for w3c css table-cell is w3schools, whereas it's not even above the fold in the results for css table-cell.

Re:No, not really.

[RealAlaskan]

So, this this the cover you werer talking about?

Re:No, not really.

[jfengel]

Yep. If you have the issue you can look inside and see me. I'm on the far left of the picture looking pretty blurry, partly because I'm well behind the focus and partly because I'd just run 23 miles.

But my customers want me to spam SEs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the owner of a small web dev firm. Most of our work is intranet apps, so no problem there, but we also do general web design etc.

Even though we do everything we can (legit) to make customer site spider friendly, and make sure the keywords are prominent in the title, heading tags and body copy, we get customers complaining that their competitors are ranking above them in Google.

Why is that?

Their competitors (or their web developers)use invisible text, doorway pages, keyword overloading, link farms and God knows what else to claw the site to the top of the pile!

Explaining that you only use 'ethical' SEO methods just looses you business.

I could weep!

Google has made this so, I'm afraid.

Re:But my customers want me to spam SEs!

[sootman]

"Google has made this so, I'm afraid."

Not quite. Sleazy marketroids were abusing Yahoo! via META tags a decade ago. Rule #1 of the universe: sleazy marketroids (pardon me if that's redundant) will do whatever is possible to make sure their company name is in your face; screw your desires, the public good, and shared resources.

Google (heh) for "tragedy of the commons." Short version: any time there are public resources freely available, abuses will follow by people who think their desires are more important than the rest. There would be no "Adopt-a-highway" program if that weren't the case.

Re:But my customers want me to spam SEs!

[fbg111]

Google has made this so, I'm afraid.

Well this is certainly an interesting unintended consequence of Page Rank. What was initially an acclaimed method of organizing the world's information, has now caused changes in the way the world's information is organized, or at least is labeled. Just goes to show you can't escape the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal - you cannot measure a system without affecting it.

I wonder if Brin & Page foresaw this back at Stanford... I also wonder what solutions they may come up with. rel=nofollow is one, but it depends on website operators, not Google. Any ideas anyone?

Re:But my customers want me to spam SEs!

[Madmonky1]

Couldn't they use some sort of bayesian filtering thing to block out the bad results? Like, give users the option to rate whether the result they found was useful, and use that data to adjust the pagerank of that site and others like it?

Of course, they would need a way to prevent abuse, and it could clutter the interface. Maybe they could see which links people are clicking for different search results, and use that data to find better search results.

Top listings are paid listings

[tburt11]

It is true, that the top listing gets about 40% of the clicks.

The second listing gets about 20% of the traffic.

The third and lower listings get single digit traffic.

A popular keyword will always have paid listings for the top two or even three in the list.

Using SEO, your top position will be third or less

Given, this third place is free (unless you are paying an SEO consultant to get you the spot), the best you will get is single digit click thrus.

From a gross traffic standpoint, you must pay for listings to get the bulk of the click thrus.

Scrap the SEO, and pay the price.

Sad but true.

Something fishy about this guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although many potential customers might wonder how good a company is if it can't rank near the top with its own term, Boser says he wouldn't want to show up high in search engine optimization as a keyword. It gives your company too much visibility (Read: makes it a bigger target.)

Why, then, does he have the top listing on Overture for "search engine optimization," paying $5.06 per clickthrough?

In my experience

[temojen]

It also ranks mailing-list messages about certain software packages above the manual or official site for the package.

Re:In my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Even worse, it lists the same mailing-list digests a gazilion times. If they'd only invest some time in finding something to remove duplicate results from the list, I'd be a happy little googler again.

Re:In my experience

[wmspringer]

Of course, the mailing list message may actually be more useful than the manual..

The ABC of SEO

[Hugo Graffiti]

If you want to know more about Search Engine Optimization, the definitive (only?) book on the subject has just been published: www.abcseo.com. The draft version is also available online.

Disclaimer: the author is a mate of mine.

Re:The ABC of SEO

[David Off]

Aggh, I just noticed that my site has been /.ed. :-).

It is not the only book out there but it tries to present SEO from the viewpoint of making pages more useful to humans - a typical example is using relevant anchor text on internal links rather than the awful "click-here". I try to steer readers away from using tricks and towards making a site that is useful for humans - well structured and internally linked just as the Web originally intended. This is generally known as ethical SEO.

- David

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Liselle]

Well, never let it be said that Google's search results aren't equal-opportunity. The second hit for "miserable failure" is www.michaelmoore.com :)

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[scupper]

well, this is pretty scary....

pulp fiction + gimp image search results from Google Images:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=pulp+f iction+%2B+gimp&btnG=Search

Look at results 12 and 16.

Similarities...

[WaldoXX]

"The search engines live in a fantasy world...
Every link is a vote. But people buy and sell links."

The same can be said about politics.

Doesn't work like that

[dtfinch]

Search spamming sometimes works, for a while at least, but it all goes to hell when your clients' sites get penalized or banned because your tactics. We've seen competitors's sites with hidden text disappear from the search rankings. On one occasion one of our own sites was badly penalized for a typo that could be seen as spamming. It took a couple months for it to rise back up to the top. And every year or so, Google does a major update to shake a bunch of the spammy sites out of their index. SEO's give these updates names like they were hurricanes, like Florida and Brandy.

This guy sounds like a complete amatuer. He talks like doing what the other 100000 black hat SEO's are already doing will guarantee his clients a lasting top 10 result. And PageRank has much less weight today than it used to. In 6 months some of his clients will probably want to sue him.

You can get a good rank that lasts without being spammy. For the most part, having good content works very well.

Re:Doesn't work like that

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get a good rank that lasts without being spammy. For the most part, having good content works very well.

That requires too much effort and planning for the bottom-feeders.

Re:Doesn't work like that

[pipingguy]

I had mod points this week and used only 1 of 5 before real life took over, so I have none to give you. Great post.

Search engine fantasy

[null etc.]

Semantic web, baby! That would invalidate ballot stuffing.

Well, it may seem obvious but....

[iBod]

Didn't Google trumpet all its mightly clever algorithms that supposedly detect and eliminate SEO spamming?

Re:Well, it may seem obvious but....

[Addiction Charters]

Yeah right...I get a few calls a day from SEO's wanting me to sign up with them for any where from 500 - 1100$ to get my site ranked number 1#

Re:Well, it may seem obvious but....

[iBod]

Well, they may just do the job for you in the short term.

If Google do pick up on SEO spam (normally because someone reports it via the Google Spam Report page) then your domain will be permanantly banned from Google (and a bunch of other major SEs).

Is it worth it?

Re:Well, it may seem obvious but....

[Tarqwak]

FYI: Google Spam Report page.

It takes quite a bit of time to affect things but seems to work.

How to report spam

[GoogleGuy]

If you find a page in Google that violates our quality guidelines (cloaking, sneaky redirects, hidden text, hidden links, etc.), please let us know by reporting it at our spam report form.

If you include the word slashdot in the "Additional details" section, I'll someone to do an additional check this weekend for Slashdot-reported spam.

We use spam report data to improve our quality directly, but also to look for new types of spam and ways to improve our scoring algorithms.

Re:How to report spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently the GG is on every message board.

Re:How to report spam

[hankwang]

Apparently the GG is on every message board.

I don't think this one is affiliated with Google. Look at this earlier post, which links to googleguy.de, which has the notice:

GoogleGuy.de is not the real GoogleGuy and not affiliated with google

There is someone who actually works for Google (apparently quite high up), who sometimes posts on behalf of Google in forums such as Webmasterworld. This one is someone else.

Re:How to report spam

[GoogleGuy]

I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm high up, but I am an engineer at Google. The googleguy.de fellow nicely let me have the GoogleGuy identity at Slashdot. I think (hope) that we sent him some schwag to say thanks.

So yes: from now on, when you see GoogleGuy on Slashdot, it is the original, tried and true GoogleGuy. I even subscribed and everything.

Re:How to report spam

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

Did the company pay for your subscription, or do you get to write it off?

Re:How to report spam

[GoogleGuy]

I could probably get Google to pay for it, but I've been reading Slashdot forever, so it was probably good for me to do my part to thank Slashdot for years of letting me enjoy geeky distraction instead of Real Work. So I just paid out of my pocket.

Re:How to report spam

[michaelhood]

Is there a 1-900 number we can call you at when the #@$@ups in creative review break my AdWords campaigns? =)

-A Loyal Advertiser

Yup.

[game kid]

"people" tends to be replaced with "candidates", "links" with "voters" and "search engines" with "elections". *sigh* sick money-whoring bastards. I hate "optimized" search results; their writers ought to die and die again, like that bitch who stole my HTML.

Misleading Robots for Fun and Profit

[billstewart]

Yeah, SEOs are 90% slime and 10% standard advice about making the information on your page accessible (e.g. telling you to use the META keywords and not just have all your navigation information in dancing flash attachments.)

• Google is a robot that tries to guess what pages are most interesting to humans.
• SEOs try to take pages that are not very interesting to humans and make them look interesting to robots.
• This is annoying to humans, because the pages aren't very interesting to humans.

Occasionally lying to robots can be fun - the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" Googlebomb, etc.

But mostly it's just annoying, and it's made some kinds of searches totally useless. I've recently been trying to find out about drug interactions, and not only do you get tons of legitimate pages that are describing the "side effects" of "drug1" and also list "drug2" in their index of things they'll tell you about (or sell, which is fine), but there are lots of pages which are full of robo-generated sentences with drug names, common medical phrases, and phrases having nothing at all to do with medicine, with medical phrases in the URL pathnames as well, designed to attract search engines to their pages. I'd expect this if I were searching for widely spammed drugs starting with V, but it's annoying to have to put up with it when I'm looking for variants on penicillins.

Stupid article based on what-if fantasy

[gelfling]

Sure. If I could get every single page in Ohio to link to me my rankings would be schwweeeeeeeet! Or if I could get Yahoo to include a link to me......woo hoo!

Problem is that none of that is practical or realistic, is it?

Re:Stupid article based on what-if fantasy

[NerveGas]

Domain names are cheap, and it's not hard at all to employ some CGI and HTTP tricks to conjure up 1,000 domains with (seemingly) unique content on thousands of pages each - while appearing to the search engine as static HTML, not dynamic... each of those linking to your page.

steve

Re:Stupid article based on what-if fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not create 10,000 Yahoo profiles and link right in the Homepage and the 3 site links in the profile, you dont even need real content in the profile - just a link. Ever search from 0-Z in the Interest groups? There is a reason...

Since were shamelessly plugging - Real Amateur Teen Models

Get him, boys!

[TiggertheMad]

Why would you post a link to his site that says HOT GAY COCK? I looked at the site and there isn't any mention of HOT GAY COCK on it. I mean, I've never been to a HOT GAY COCK page before, but I can imagine what a HOT GAY COCK site looks like. I mean, it doesn't even seem close to a HOT GAY COCK site. First off, there needs to be a lot more HOT GAY COCK on the site. And when I say more, I mean at least one HOT GAY COCK. There isn't even one single HOT GAY COCK to be found.

Now, you may find yorself suddenly at the top of Googles rankings for HOT GAY COCK. Don't thank me, just convert your hosting businuess over to a pr0n site that has HOT GAY COCK, rake in the cash, and send me a cut. Afterall, Does your hosting businuess really make more money than a HOT GAY COCK site?

Now that we have worn that joke out completely, you should check the google listing for you page in a week or two to see where it is in the ranking for HGC. Since all the links to your site regarding HGC are from /., it will give you an idea ho heavily slashdot's links are weighed in the ranking system. It would be interesting to see how quickly you get a boost from silliness such as this.

(mods: this honestly isn't a troll, read the parent and grandparent posting.)

Re:Get him, boys!

[Anonymous Coward]

way to ride the karma wake of this anonymous coward.

No, really it was me. you unoriginal bastard.

Re:Get him, boys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I don't feel the least bit guilty. Try growing some balls and posting non-ac, you dipshit.

Re:Get him, boys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you are obsessed with HGC...
Try googling for some.

Re:Get him, boys!

[Billly Gates]

Actually if thats his business I am sure he would no
t mind gay porn websites being hosted at soso.com or whatever it is.

Just because he hosts it does not mean he views it himself. Money is money.

Re:Get him, boys!

[WoBIX]

What's the point? He'll just end up at the parents site :)

Re:Get him, boys!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a good test. His site's PageRant is already 6/10. Let's see what happens to http://www.poker-game-strategy.com/. It's PageRank is 0!

Re:Get him, boys!

[mike.newton]

Since all the links to your site regarding HGC are from /.

They probably aren't any more.

Re:Get him, boys!

[bedessen]

You're wasting your time. All links in slashdot have rel="nofollow" so they're ignored by google for the purposes of indexing. If you don't believe me, view the source...

The good thing

[Anonymous Cowdog]

The good thing is that, while it is indeed true that the search engines are manipulable, at least they do have workmanlike user interfaces.

Moral bankruptcy

[magarity]

He claims he's just being realistic. "The search engines created the monster," he said

And there isn't a modern banking regulation system in place in third world countries either, so it's OK for the dictators and their friends and family to pillage the populace for their own gain. That's the end result of thinking like this guy. He's morally bankrupt but feels good about himself. Obviously a product of the publik edukashun sistim.

Re:Moral bankruptcy

[syphax]

He's morally bankrupt but feels good about himself. Obviously a product of the publik edukashun sistim.

How does this follow? Have you by any chance ever attended a private school?

Re:Moral bankruptcy

[magarity]

Yes, I attended both types. The public school was dumbed down to the lowest common denominator for everyone while the private school emphasized learning as much and as difficult as each student could handle.

these people aren't manipulating things...

[bad_outlook]

they're spamming. really, how is this different than people getting spammed? it's happening, just in a different way. I dislike how cookies and such track users, although many sites need cookies to function. while I try to protect myself, I still feel like I'm vuln - and this article illistrates why!

bo

Google is not the ONLY search engine

[mcguyver]

This article doesn't even mention Google yet people in this thread believe SEO only applies to Google. There are three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Re:Google is not the ONLY search engine

[Gavin86]

When you're getting into SEO you will quickly find that, quite honestly, Google is all that matters. I don't know that people think that SEO only applies to Google, but I know many people who understand that SEO is more effective with Google.

Re:Google is not the ONLY search engine

[avkillick]

I'm sorry - but Google is all that matters. 95% of my search engine traffic comes from Googe and it's regional derivatives.

Re:Google is not the ONLY search engine

[mcguyver]

Google is all that matters.

Ugh. It used to be all Google all the time but those days passed long ago. I recommend looking into Y & MSN because there is a lot of untapped potential. Plus you need diversity. Having done SEO for years you get to appreciate competition by having multiple search engines. Times are great when say, you rank #1 for phentermine in Y! and all their distribution partners. However it hurts when you drop in the SERPs on everything at once - this happened to my company with phentermine and it's definitely stressful to have to get back up. Having MSN, Y! & G adds a lot of stability.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly an uninspired attempt at revenge.

Boost?

[Nexboy]

Just in the interest of science, this posting is a test of this Google-boosting strategy. Now if everybody on /. replies to my post, my company's page ranking may start to approach that of the professional index-spammers.

Seriously, I wonder why Google can't just filter out links to sites which don't have any relevant key words....

Re:Boost?

[Deton8]

Google has the ability to find "similar pages", they could reduce the score of any link where the pages lack similarity. Not perfect, but better than what they do now.

I think it's simply hard to ignore human nature.

[DavisNet]

It seems inherent that if it is possible to manipulate the rankings to improve traffic to a website, weather for economic or egotistical reasons, a certain percentage if people will do it. I think it will simply be a fact of life for the foreseeable future. Unless google and their ilk are able to create a solution technologically...

SEO?

[Quixote]

And the Goebbels Euphemism Of The Year award goes to the guy who came up with the teasm "Search Engine Optimization"!

--
Elmwood, a community blog

Possible Fix?

[CodeBuster]

Would it be possible for google to modify their algorithms so that when the graph of all web pages is considered links from pages which are involved in a cycle of unrelated links are given a decreasing importance relative to the number of unrelated links involved in the cycle?

Re:Possible Fix?

[Waters Construction]

Thats a very interesting Idea. I assumed that they did something simaler already.

Re:Possible Fix?

[Anonymous Coward]

What did you just say?

Re:Possible Fix?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward of course but flame away.

Would it be possible for google to modify their algorithms so that when the graph of all web pages is considered links from pages which are involved in a cycle of unrelated links are given a decreasing importance relative to the number of unrelated links involved in the cycle?

Already done and way more complex than that. The age of the domain matters, the older the better (regardless of the Google Sandbox effect). A domian will not be ranked in the top SERPs (Search Engine Result Page) for a money term if it was registered within the last 12 months. This helps against SEO spammers who register and use domains with total automation, sometimes registering 10 domains/day.

This so called "expert" is nothing more than an amateur. The top SEOs are not for hire, we earn more working as affiliates. Personally, I am a white hat/grey hat SEO for adult affiliate programs with over 200 domains. I calculated I would earn $200k/year as a "SEO consultant", but I am already earning $700k/year as an affiliate.

You do not "learn" SEO overnight. You'd have to work for 16hours/day everyday for 2 years to be able to reverse engineer the SE algorithms and they are constantly changing. A high degree in Mathematics or Computer Science helps. Boring tasks and programming is done for me by bright CS students, but I never teach enough to be able to do it themselves.

Wow..

[ekool]

The wicked tangled web we weave?

I thought this was old news?

[spicytuna]

I figured everybody know about this little trick? Having wired "expose" this practice just means more blog spam of us all. :sigh:

Making SEO SOL

[Eponymous Koward]

Search engines have at least two options to deal with SEO.

Option 1: Defensive tweaking of ranking algorithm. Craig Silverstein estimated in a talk a three years ago that "most" of the thinking with respect to ranking was in response to battling SEO. And that was before anyone knew what SEO stood for.

Option 2: Lower the cost of advertising. If you can put your link in a banner ad more cheaply than using SEO to get the top result, you'll probably take that path. The cost of advertising has a direct impact on the viability of the business of SEO.

Option 2 isn't bad: if Google lowers the cost of advertising, their margins shrink, but less investment in defending SEO will be required, and results will be more relevant.

Furthermore, option 1 is hard. To fight SEO, you need to distinguish between that portion of the web which is a network of human-created links, and that portion which is doing its best to simulate being human-created. This is an AI-hard problem.

Ultimately, google needs to strike the right balance between options 1 and 2. They need to make SEO more expensive than it's worth. My guess is that, right now, there is more than one open spreadsheet devoted to figuring out that balance.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[The employee can cho]

What about option 3?

End users learn how to search better and avoid these junk sites.

I am sure most of us have figured out how to find what we are looking for via Google. In time, the rest of the internet population will adapt to avoid the spam traps.

Since I started google-hacking for MP3s (songs I already own of course,) I have seen several companies adjust their pages to show up in the natural search results for a google-hack search for pretty much any artist. The intarwed is full of jerks waiting to exploit any potential avenue that might get them traffic.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[opensourceIT]

AI is not required. Just add a "This link was
useless/spam" icon next to each google result item.
Then users who are annoyed by the bad link can
click "Back" and click on the icon to inform
google. After a sufficient number of thumbs
down, the link gets delisted (with baysian (?)
stats negatively impacting "similar" search
results in future).

Re:Making SEO SOL

[The employee can cho]

What is to stop me from organizing a campaign to 'remove' all of my competitor's links?

Re:Making SEO SOL

[opensourceIT]

A simple automatic karma-like system whereby your ip/signature/tod is used to rank each thumbs down. ie it doesn't get counted until it correlates with n other independent thumbs downers. Google could automatically examine the system logs for coordinated campaigns and mass disqualify participants votes. The system works because the vast large majority of thumbs downers would be genuine and spread sparsely in link-space.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[dtfinch]

Just rent a bot net. 40000 unique IP's. That'll do the trick.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[hankwang]

Just add a "This link was useless/spam" icon next to each google result item.

Nice idea, but people who are low enough to spam SEs won't have any problems to write a program that makes automated Google queries (from different IPs) to get their competitors further down on the SERP list.

The Google Toolbar actually has an option to vote for a webpage (any webpage), but I think Google only uses it to improve spam detection algorithms, not to directly affect the position on the SERPs.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[opensourceIT]

No it won't, because they will clearly be targetting a link. ie their actions will not be "sparse" in time as well as IP address. If you modify to also make them sparse in time then you are outvoted by the other metric google has access to , ie the number of implied "thumbs up" clickers of the link who did not complain. Also your bot net has to manage to sparsely click not only the link you are targetting but also other genuinely bad links. In the limit the job of the bot net is the one requiring AI!

Re:Making SEO SOL

[opensourceIT]

How about a social engineering solution to bot net's. Someone with moderately deep pockets (google ;-) could regularly purchase bot net time from the undernet providers, have them generate attacks on fake targets, then automatically ban those machines from google access until they get fixed. ie a google search from an owned box gets a page informing the owner of how to fix it. For extra points, publish monthly stats of owned boxes per IP segment.

Re:Making SEO SOL

[soundproofing.noise]

I think you are wrong, as much expenditure as possible should be invested in option 1. Building better AI and search algorithms is advancing the state of the art, the battle between SEO and search engines pushes evolution on both sides and will lead to better things. Do we want things to stagnate and deflate to lowest cost least effort or do we want the battle between the SE and SEO to lead to improved relevance of searches and push the frontiers of AI.

If you can't avoid the the spam sites you're not using your search engine correctly. SEO spam results(such as word lists) are really only gaming the lowest common denominator, and can generally be sussed from the google summary. The sites that are paying to be ranked are generally selling something relevant to your search, which might be what you are looking for.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

do you honestly believe gives a shit what some onetrick pony of a "film" maker thinks of him

distributed search engine

[sleepingsquirrel]

Seems like what we really need is a distributed search engine (a la bittorrent) with a PGP Web of Trust thingy added in. First of all, I want to do searches, you want to do searches, we all want to do searches. So why not use our machines cooperatively to search the web? But why should I trust any of the links you find for me? (you could be a commercial spammer after all) Well, that's where the web of trust comes in. I might not know you, but I might know someone who knows someone, who knows someone who can vouch for your trustworthiness. Why would anyone cooperate? Well if you're tired of the same old crap, maybe you wouldn't. And if you wanted your stuff to be found, you'd have great incentive to cooperate. We'd just need to build something into the protocol to ensure reciprocity. Ta, da. Surely, that would be an interesting project for someone to start hacking on.

Re:distributed search engine

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe parent got modded up. God i hate slashdot....but i just can't stop reading it. its like a sick fetish. poster obviously has no clue how search engines work. buzzwords like "distributed" and "pgp web of trust" are thrown in but without their application explained. I mean how would indexing crawling and searching be done in a way comparable to google!?!?! apparently it does matter though.

Re:distributed search engine

[MrHops]

To add to this idea, you could have a second type of trust-level where the searcher would only accept the bonafides of someone within a certain number of hops in the web of trust, or could remove nodes from the web of trust, (and any nodes dependent on this node). This would enable searchers to craft a search-space to their parameters.

(Yes, I read the link to the PGP Web of Trust, and understand that their version of trust-level is different)

rank me up google!!!!

[psycobrat]

my site
my site also
again my site
dammit this is getting boring... aww fuck it my site AGAIN!
i need some karma *sniff*

Re:rank me up google!!!!

[psycobrat]

dammit! slashdot auto edited my links!!!!!!! now i am NEVER gonna get #1 in google!!!!!!! sigh no #4 profit for me.

Free software angle

[sleepingsquirrel]

And it for those of us who love Free software, it sticks in our craw that we depend of the benevolance of a commercial enterprise to preform web searches. What better motivation for a Free search engine could there be?

Re:Search Engines without Advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

Dulance (www.dulance.com) will happily filter out the commercial sites for you. While trying, note that the default is the reverse (commercial sites only :-)

Getting better Google results

[avkillick]

I have found that to get the best results from Google you need to remove common words and phrases that have been used by SEO's. For example, I was looking for a particular hotel in Paris recently. If "Hotel" and "Paris" were in the search string, I got garbage. Just naming the hotel got me lucky every time. And don't even bother trying "Paris Hilton" :)

Re:Getting better Google results

[The employee can cho]

Your "Paris Hilton" results would have been fine if you simply included -slut in your search term.

Re:Getting better Google results

[avkillick]

I guess the moral of my story is You'll never get luck with "Paris Hilton"

Re:Getting better Google results

[dajak]

Seriously? I get perfectly valid results for "Paris hotel". Where you searching for some "Hotel Solomon", or "Hotel Tapes" or something?

I know we used to get an irritating and unwanted redirect to the Dutch version of Google here (which for some reason prefers Dutch language pages accidentally containing the English search phrase). This problem is now solved, but I wonder whether your location influences search results.

A clear path to a good Google ranking

[wintermute42]

There is a clear path to a good Google ranking: publish good content that people want to read. If you sell widgets, publish material on widgets, their use, development, etc... If you can't find a constant stream of interesting material to publish on your product and services then perhaps you are in the wrong business.

Think about this: how many of us know about Fog Creek Software because of Joel Spolsky's "Joel on Software" web page? I don't think that this was Joel's original intent, but his writing has been a great marketing tool for his software business.

Rather than waste money on web site marketing and trying to game Google, invest in building content on your site. If you do this, your links will grow and your Google ranking will go up. It's really that simple.

Of course this approach does not have the attraction of a quick fix. You actually have to invest in building your business.

A number of people have commented on how poorly researched the Wired article is. I've subscribed to Wired since the early days. At one time Wired ran innovative and interesting articles. For example, Neal Stephenson's excellent article on undersea telecommunications cables. The magazine is now a tragic shadow if its former self. My subscription is expiring this year and I don't intend to renew it. Wired's journalistic and editorial standards have become pathetic. It has become an attempt at a techno-geek version of the "lad mag" Stuff without the scantily clad women.

Re:A clear path to a good Google ranking

[codeconfused]

I think this quote needs to be said again

Rather than waste money on web site marketing and trying to game Google, invest in building content on your site. If you do this, your links will grow and your Google ranking will go up. It's really that simple.

Simply put. Simply done. Forget getting trying to beat the system. Just work on making the content better and watch your logs, not google's

Free Porn Magic For You!

[djaxl]

My own attempt to get high search engine ranking: Free Porn Magic For You! Based on an article at PC Magazine. Please click on Free Porn Magic For You! to make me amazingly rich and famous.

Great book: Managing Gigabytes

[Hackeron]

Mark me offtopic, but if you want to learn how search engines really work, this is one great book.

Managing Gigabytes - Second Edition
Ian H, Witten, Alistair Moffat, Timothy C. Bell
Morgan Kaufmann publishing

I bought it recently to help me design a database and its really one incredible book. Best technical book I've read to date.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[neil.pearce]

Reminds me of the amusing Google image search for Ainsley Harriot
(he's very popular UK chef, always on the telly) that brings back Adolf Hitler for the second match...

Google is completly broken

[bored]

I concluded this about 3 years ago, when they started to try to avoid people gaming them. Back then I used to be able to type two very specific keywords (a OS platform, and the specific name of a piece of software I ported to that platform) into google and my page would appear. Now when I type those two keywords into google the "and" function doesn't seem to work, I get a lot of pages about the platform a few pages about the piece of software but nowhere is there any mention of my page where I maintain that piece of software for a particular platform. God only knows how many people would like to use my freely avialable software but can't find it because the "search" engines simply don't rank it high enough. The funny thing is that there are maybe a half dozen related pages that link to mine and the converse and we are all pretty much in a black whole 30 or 40 pages into the google rankings.

Of course if I type the whole title to my page I can get it but that is the point of a search engine, to figure out what you mean and display the appropriate page.

Re:Search Engines without Advertising

[dingfelder]

that is actually a cool site, I had not seen it before.

I only have issues with it:

1. it defaults to commercial sites
2. it only searches north american sites (and I am now in NZ).

For those looking for things in the US though, it is nice.

Will this help?

[duffer_01]

Do web sites that purchase links from external websites count as a violation? I think the big problem is not necessarily cloaking, sneaky redirects, etc, but rather that a website can buy incoming links to move them up in the ranking. Personally I think this is what needs to be fixed.

However, I also understand that it is hard to prove that a website has purchased incoming links so perhaps there is nothing that can be done.

Most Useless Article Ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - can anyone post a more useless article? There is absolutely nothing interesting in this article that the average slashdotter didn't already know. If this is really "New for Nerds" then those posting articles should consider their audience.

why does this require a subject

[manitee]

that guy is a tool.

Is GoogleGuy from Google?

[hankwang]

So yes: from now on, when you see GoogleGuy on Slashdot, it is the original, tried and true GoogleGuy.

I must admit, the style of your earlier posts fits very well with that of the True GoogleGuy. Too bad that the sysadmins here are not likely to confirm whether your IP address is from Google like they did elsewhere, so we'll never be completely sure. :)

that's right!

[gr8dude]

A company that plays a fair game is very likely to be beaten by its competitors - who feel no remorse when doing this stupid optimization crap.

I am a helpdesk agent at a software company, one of my duties is to write howto's and guides about our applications. After each tutorial is complete, my manager sort of forces me to use the keywords more frequently, and apply these shitty techniques... It breaks my heart, because I do my best to write a nice tutorial, and in the end it becomes another stupid doc with a lot of popular keywords in it.

The point is that you either do that, or eat dust :-|

The good news is that I still write about what my company *really* does, and the tutorials are quite informative. But when I do a search and see that the competitors that have a buggy product with less features have a higher rank - how can I remain calm??

I too noticed that the quality of the results provided by google is degrading. I just have a list of sites I frequently visit, like slashdot for example, and in places like these i find new material and read new stuff. In fact, I don't use search engines that often anymore.

I hope they come up with a new method, which will give a better chance to those who try to play fair.

So why not use SpamAsassin?

[fons]

So why not use SpamAsaasin or something similar on the results? Bogus sites are very similar to spam in look and feel.

It could be a feature that you can choose to turn off.

If you want real interresting content: turn it on.

If you're looking for porn an on-line store: turn it off.

Yeah, I want to be listed first...

[jonadab]

I want to be the first result on Google for the word "of". Who's with me?
We'll just use these simple techniques he's outlined, buy a few links, ...

Top listings are paid listings--Sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns only generate 20% traffic whereas organic results generate 80% especially for results that are above the fold. However for that 20% clickthrough, you're often spending 80% of your advertising budget to get to the top spot. Considering that you also have to factor in a 20% click fraud rate (conservatively) PPC isn't quite the good investment you seem to think it is.

Additionally, getting conversions from any clickthrough drops your ROI even further so your 80% investment to get your 20% clickthrough might only net you 5% conversions if your landing page is compelling enough.

That's not to say that PPC doesn't have its advantages but to claim that it is a better investment than ranking organically is simply ignorant.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

The second result for me was Jimmy Carter. Or, is he the second result only for being associated with the same house as GWB?

Not to mention

[trezor]

Not to mention that with one simple googlebomb, which was my first and only attempt ever, I got first result at google for what I wanted.

Serach engines are way to easily manipulated.

Google fixed that recently...

[hkmwbz]

Google recently updated their searches. Now you actually get relevant results again for things like "GeForce 6600GT". You used to get "buy now!" links, but now it links to product information and actual reviews/tests.

fuckedgoogle.com had this story weeks ago

[googisgod]

When will people learn? Google has become a gigantic joke if you're looking for actual relevant results.

fuckedgoogle had a story on this exact topic a while back:

http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/my_weblog/2005/02/goog le_results_.html

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean how would indexing crawling and searching be done in a way comparable to google!?!?!

Why would it have to be done just like google? But let's run a few numbers to see some possibilities. Google uses, what, a server farm with ~10,000 diverse machines? Shit, I thought we had a story on /. about 1,000,000 zombie machines being use as spam bots. You don't think that maybe we could get 10 million people to cooperate enough to enable searching? 10 million, thats what, say 2% of the machines out there? Especially since 90% of the time, most of the machines on the 'Net are acting as space heaters? Whatever. Try using your imagination some time.

Finding medical information

[Anonymous Coward]

Working in pharma, I know exactly what you mean. If it's not the internet pharmacies and their shadier cousins, or the comment and wiki spammers, it's the spamdexing in meta headers practiced by supposedly reputable companies. I picked up a trick from - I think it was Google Hacks - repeat the keyword(s) of interest, twice or even three times. That seems preferentially to pull up pages with multiple instances of the keyword(s), much more likely to be relevant. And using Google with site:www.fda.gov or site:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov can be an effective way to search the FDA site (a nightmare to navigate), or PubMed.

Re:search engines can be manipulated? Wow

[Aeron65432]

How about researching some French military Victories? http://www.google.com/search?q=%22French+military+ victories%22&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start =0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozi lla:en-US:official/

Google in the small business arena:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you will look at this page, you will see from the html how I managed to get this page listed in Google at the top of the results simply by entering the keyword "rankin animal clinic". Look at the table html under the comment "top of page immediate appearance page identifier". That term means nothing to Google, I just made it up, but the information in the table at the very top of the page is picked up by googlebot, and then you have your page listed where you want it. Nothing wrong with that, or the method. Google stopped using meta tags long ago, so something else had to be used. I just wanted the clients of this clinic to be able to find the site. There is, btw, an online patient form that can be downloaded and filled out, faxed, or brought in with the animal, and save a lot of time. You can imagine having to fill out one of these forms in the office, with your animal in your arms.

buying and selling links

[neuroinf]

Hey, you saw it here first: http://www.aset.org.au/confs/iims/1992/jennings.ht ml note date :-) sorry, couldn't resist...