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*
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
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.
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.
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!