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
-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 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.