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."
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
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*
What a miserable failure!
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
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.
He didn't mention link exchanges in the article - merely link buying. You're absolutely correct that with PageRank algorithms that have been around for years that exchanging links actually hurt your results.
Buying a link for cash on the other hand can help you greatly especially if you're buying that link on a PR6 or higher site.
I'm a big tall mofo.
... but this is getting silly! Still interesting, but kinda silly.
Good old googledot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By putting my servers in different positions in the server room a couple of times a week
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The second listing gets about 20% of the traffic.
The third and lower listings get single digit traffic.
A popular keyword will always have paid listings for the top two or even three in the list.
Using SEO, your top position will be third or less
Given, this third place is free (unless you are paying an SEO consultant to get you the spot), the best you will get is single digit click thrus.
From a gross traffic standpoint, you must pay for listings to get the bulk of the click thrus.
Scrap the SEO, and pay the price.
Sad but true.
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.
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.
- 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
Why would you post a link to his site that says HOT GAY COCK? I looked at the site and there isn't any mention of HOT GAY COCK on it. I mean, I've never been to a HOT GAY COCK page before, but I can imagine what a HOT GAY COCK site looks like. I mean, it doesn't even seem close to a HOT GAY COCK site. First off, there needs to be a lot more HOT GAY COCK on the site. And when I say more, I mean at least one HOT GAY COCK. There isn't even one single HOT GAY COCK to be found.
/., it will give you an idea ho heavily slashdot's links are weighed in the ranking system. It would be interesting to see how quickly you get a boost from silliness such as this.
Now, you may find yorself suddenly at the top of Googles rankings for HOT GAY COCK. Don't thank me, just convert your hosting businuess over to a pr0n site that has HOT GAY COCK, rake in the cash, and send me a cut. Afterall, Does your hosting businuess really make more money than a HOT GAY COCK site?
Now that we have worn that joke out completely, you should check the google listing for you page in a week or two to see where it is in the ranking for HGC. Since all the links to your site regarding HGC are from
(mods: this honestly isn't a troll, read the parent and grandparent posting.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Domain names are cheap, and it's not hard at all to employ some CGI and HTTP tricks to conjure up 1,000 domains with (seemingly) unique content on thousands of pages each - while appearing to the search engine as static HTML, not dynamic... each of those linking to your page.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
That was a rare (and frightening!) look inside someone else's brain. Thank you.
The good thing is that, while it is indeed true that the search engines are manipulable, at least they do have workmanlike user interfaces.
bo
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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