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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."
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.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
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
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.
I'm a big tall mofo.
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.
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.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
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.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Adventure City Tours
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.
bo
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
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.
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.