Slashdot Mirror
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."
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).
Adventure City Tours
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.
I'm a big tall mofo.
-buy -price -checkout -sale -shop
I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
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.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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