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A Search Engine Manipulator's Tale

Posted by Zonk on from the skeezy dept.

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."

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Misleading by duffer_01 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? by micromoog · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

  3. nip it in the bud by temojen · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  4. Use nofollow! by sho222 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. How to report spam by GoogleGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:How to report spam by GoogleGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.