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."

Comments

On no

[suso]

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*

But my customers want me to spam SEs!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Misleading Robots for Fun and Profit

[billstewart]

Yeah, SEOs are 90% slime and 10% standard advice about making the information on your page accessible (e.g. telling you to use the META keywords and not just have all your navigation information in dancing flash attachments.)

• 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.