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."
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*
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.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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.
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?
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.
My little site.
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.
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
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
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?
- 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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Without you I'm one step closer to happiness without violence.
I don't think this one is affiliated with Google. Look at this earlier post, which links to googleguy.de, which has the notice:
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.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
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.
The saddest poem
Did the company pay for your subscription, or do you get to write it off?
My little site.
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.
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.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
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.
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.