Slashdot Mirror
Google's Site Ranking Secrets
vivin writes "Ever wonder how Google's site ranking works? Wonder no more. Google recently filed United States Patent Application 20050071741 on March 31, 2005. This patent reveals a great deal of information about Google's site ranking algorithm and makes very good reading. For example, one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered. If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you. A site registered for a longer period of time means that the owner is probably serious about the site, and the site is probably legitimate. Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google). This information will also make it easier for you to make sure that you get listed well in Google."
No post and already slashdotted.
Long live asp-based sites.
FP?
Note that there is no guarantee that Google uses everything in the patent or that they don't use other methods not described in any of their other patents.
or conversely how spam website can get higher :)
I prefer the official Google explanation:
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones.
'Google record the discovery of a link and link changes over time. The speed at which a site gains links and the link life span.' I fail to see how this would be helpful--if something's new and briefly popular, you only want to give it a high rank for a brief period and forget it once people stop linking. But if something's new and popular for a duration, you want to keep it well ranked.
Could someone explain how other crap search engines are getting high rankings in Google search?
Sometimes when I search for something specific, I get a bunch of useless links that have results of other "search engines" that invariably show something similar to "0 results for your search terms 'sheep+barn+slashbot+erotica'"
How do these sites get on the first page of Google results?
They've thrown every technique they could have thought of into the patent purely as a defensive mechanism to prevent other major engines from patenting them. Some of the techniques are thrown in as defensive FUD to prevent newbies from using them.
.. what do I know ..
Some of these techniques are just plain old bizzare and might be way too difficult to approach algorithmically.
Oh well
They should indeed.
Step 2: Go 5 years into past, buy domain names, set up sites with lots of soft porn images
Step 3: Return to present, stopping off each year on the way to renew domains. Step 4: Sell to spammers etc.
Step 5: Profit.
I'm open to venture capitalists for investment in this one.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Argh... quit trying to game the system! If you read the article, it's entirely from the perspective of someone trying to corrupt the rankings for financial gain. Here's an idea: make good, useful web pages, rather then spending all your time an energy creating these BS link farms. The SEO world is the modern day equivilent of snake-oil salesmen.
Woah, I'm a genious! ;-)
"Am I correct in assuming that these sites pops up and down relatively often? Maybe it'd be possible to use temporal component to the rating. Say if the link points to a site which was just registered two days ago, it's given a very very low weight, and then you ramp up as time goes by."
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I want to change. Please help me--I don't think I can do it on my own.
The submission contains typographical errors that make it more difficult to read. Did the editor even read over the summary? I suppose not, you must be new here, LOLOLOLOLOL, etc... But I don't get it. Is there some thrill in posting sloppy writeups? I'm sure this comment will be 10 times redundant if I wait any longer so I guess I'll submit now and make a meaningful contribution later. At least the "ne" was a failed attempt to write "one" and not an abbreviation for "any" or a poorly placed Monty Python joke. Oh internet...
I always suspected this... When we've started our business, we used the domain www.interakt.ro (we're from Romania). However, because we sell software tools mostly to the USA and Western Europe, we've decided to go to www.interaktonline.com.
:D
Instantly, our ranking went from number one (for "Dreamweaver Php" for example, we were number one there instead of Macromedia itself a long time), to page 10.
Now, we're working hard to promote our site, we have links all over the place, but still our site don't get up again to page 1 (search for "dreamweaver extensions" - we have to pay to get our site in the first position). I even thought that they do this on purpose for us to continue to pay on Google Ads
Probably they say it too in the patent, but the best ranking tool is to use the right "title" tag in your pages. It's invaluable how well this scores as compared to the page content.
Alexandru
Maybe someone can clarify this, but would it not of been better to make loads of patents instead of one big one?
If something is thrown out of the patent it would invalide everything on the patent?
Nothing in the patent nullifies my pagerank defeating technique - put lots of links to my homepage in slashdot posts modded to +5 funny!
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
The article dedicates only a couple of paragraphs to PageRank, the main algorithm that Google uses, and about 2.5 pages to the rest. If anyone wants to know more about PageRank, here's Page and Brin's original paper: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
I hate the one hundred and twenty character limit for signatures with an all-enveloping, all-destroying, incredible pass
http://www.googlerankings.com/
"If your site has been registered for less than a year, then it counts against you."
Doesn't help new legitimate startup sites though, just like google was once.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Hoisted by my own petard! Parent make a grammar mistake. If irony meant what people think it means, this would be it.
I really don't think proof-reading would have helped. The problem is much simpler--the author is an idiot.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
So that explains a lot. What a crappy article, I wonder if the submitter is the same as the Author?
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
the word 'boxen', now /. is using 'listen' as a noun. l33t. very l33t.
Two interesting quotes from the buzzle.com article: "I recommend you bookmark this page now" "As mentioned above it may also help if you could get your visitors to bookmark you" Interesting...
Maybe it says something about them at
http://corpwatch.org/
or
http://malfeasance.50megs.com/
one of the criteria that they use is the number of years that your site has been registered
is not the same thing as (from the article):
How many years did you register your domain name for?
Though the summary suggests that older sites do better, the article is stating that, in order to improve one's Google ranking, domain owners should purchase longer domain registrations.
And another small note... Initially, we have used an HTTP 403 (Permanently moved) from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com. This caused us a MASSIVE degradation of our position, so right now we just do a transparent redirect from interakt.ro to interaktonline.com, without the Permanently moved headers (and this is how we've reached page 2...)
Alexandru
I've not really approved of the concept up until now, but it looks like Google has applied software patents quite well. I applaud them.
Some of the tatics detailed in the article require a spyware (google toolbar?). It is not possible for google to know when you came back to the search engine from your site, or another one (unless you have a link in your site to google). It also impossible for google to know if you have a bookmark.
Google does have a click-through engine attached to the results, but many people find this in adition to the single identifier cookie that googles push into you abusive already.
We all thing google is doing a good job, and it did managed to incorporate adds and an add service that is well accepted by the people. (I wonder why people still think it is a good idea to make blinking and noisy flash adds?) The point is how much we trust google? I personaly don't mind very much the click through, but do not accept the cookie and will not install a toolbar.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80004005'
[DBNETLIB][ConnectionOpen
(PreLoginHandshake()).]General network error. Check your network documentation.
E:\WEB\BUZZLE\EDITORIALS\../common.asp, line 156
Buzzle? Okay if this guy is a fan of Dr Dre or something I'm going to eat my own socks...
I'll continue to wonder because I'm getting an internal "Page Not Found" message after some weird Microsoft DB messages...
Seems ironic.
The story is so old I can't believe it made it to slashdot.
Some more on info the subject:
1. U.S. Patent Application - it's best to read what's exactly been patented.
2. interesting discussion on webmasterworld
Personally I think that while some of the stuff is interesting, most of it is made up rather to confuse SEOs (google doesn't quite like them, you know that, right?). Before that, they had couple factors to think about and work on. Now, there's a shitload of stuff that just makes their work harder. Also, more factors influencing SERPS means it's much, much harder to make a trial-an-error research on what works well and what doesn't.
Won't this information now make it easier for spam sites to get listed?
And now you've got another link from Slashdot...Does it help?
Sig Art Vandeley - Architect
Their pagerank algorithm was one of the keys to their success. Keeping it secret was one of the things that made Google work and it was a good secret - nobody completely knew how it worked. So why patent it? What's the point?
Divulging information about how Google works to the world!
Welcome to Soviet Russia!
It should help , who knows (I haven't read the patent :)
However, this is a real problem that we have, and we were slashdotted for good not so long ago, when we've made a solid PHP market analysis PHP usage in the Enterprise. It was a (un)pleasant experience, never made it again.
I would literally pay google to say my site is legit, but I suspect spammer would do the same...
This type of spam (showing a page to the crawler and another to the user) is called cloaking. Cloakers have anticipated this sort of move and can detect a search engine's crawler by not just the user agent but also the IP address range it comes from and other heuristics. In order to beat them, search engines would have to crawl from unpredictable IP addresses and behave like regular users.
A while back I proposed a distributed approach like this in the Nutch mailing list. The problem is that it would be hard to implement and it may not be worth the effort, since there are cheaper ways to fight spam.
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
Just look at the patent application yourself.
I haven't read the whole thing, but just having taken a quick look at it, I have to agree with the posters who said that Google purposefully tried to cover any conceivable technique to index and rank pages. The application discusses multiple implementations of the various techniques that could be used to rank a page. Therefore analysis of the patent application is probably of limited utility for those trying to game PageRank (which was certainly a factor that Google's very competent IP lawyers considered before prosecuting the patent).
For those who are worried that Google is doing evil with this patent application, given the breadth of the patent and the fact that it discusses a plethora of techniques which Google may or may not be using, I will be surprised to see Google try to use this patent (or be able to use this patent) to push another search engine out of the market. More likely, I think, is that this will constitute prior art to enable Google to withstand challenges from other patent applicants for infringement. Of course, if you know anything about PageRank, you know that it was getting published in Scientific American long before Google was the dominant search engine. So this patent application is probably more to prevent allegations that Google infringed by adding on all the other checks and balances to the original PageRank technology to discourage spam sites.
Moiche
403 is "Access denied", so that would explain a lot ...
I assume you meant "301".
I thought it was an intentional mistake!
No, its not that simple. Lets say I have a small business, I sell garden tools, lawnmowers,etc, in a certain region. And yet I do a search on google for garden tools + region, I am nowhere to be found. What do I do? I optimise the hell out of my site, caking it with region name + garden tools information, and I set up a links exchange program, getting in links left right and centre from related sites. This is SEO, and it will only affect people that enter a search for "garden" "tools" "my region". In other words, those that actually want to find my site.
Theres a distinction between SEO and spamming; if I was to optimise for a garden tools site and set up a poker site there, that would be spamming.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
...Most decent domain names have been registered and squatted on already, any any new startups are quite likely to use one of these.
If this has been previously squatted on by part of a linkfarm, as is often case, will this have any negative connotations for the future google ranking of the new site?
Which will fare better in the google rankings:
a) A freshly registered domain (that will be penalised as stated in the article).
b) A domain thats been regged for years (but squatted on and filled with spammy links) then sold on to a new startup ?
Oups - 301, indeed :)
Alexandru
Symptoms include:
- Sore throat
- Enlarged lymph nodes
- Chills
- Joint aches
- Loss of appetite and slight weight loss
- Nausea and vomiting, occasionally
- A red rash, usually on the chest -- much more common if the person has recently taken the antibiotics ampicillin or amoxicillin (both sold under several brand names)
- Abdominal pain
- Enlarged spleen
If you suffer from some or all of these symptoms, please consult your GP, and for heaven's sakes don't kiss anyone on the lips.Moiche
The patent is a decoy...
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
If any of you have worked in a small online shops you know what a fucking holy war this is between marketing and pretty much everyone else. I specifically remember saying at one point, "Do we have to make ALL of the money RIGHT NOW?"
Good for Google for coming forward and telling peole they won't be a part of that slimy shit.
Bad for Google for saying all of this to drive up prices on their AdWord sales.
s'wut i sed.
I'll have to remember that excuse next time :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
HOT is SEXY!
People LOVE SEXY!
I once worked at a site and we had to take a lot of the nice looking CSS out becuase people werent smart enough to know what was a link and what wasn't. We did find a nice maroon, though.
Then again, our customer base was so dumb one guy actually faxed us to ask for out phone number becuase the number on the site, basically like this: 1-800-PRODUCTS, had one number too many.
Way to get users to follow a link? No, you dont make the Title of the linked article hot, you do this:
People are almost compelled to click on anything that says "Click Here."
More fun with users: use CSS to make your linked text type BOLD on hover and listen to complaints as the rest of the text scarily shifts over.
offtopic, anyone?
s'wut i sed.
One friend of mine is in the same business and managed to acheive a top ten spot for the search "first time homebuyer," although I no longer see his website there. I think he probably got knocked off the top because he also used "search engine spamming" techniques to reach that point . . . like creating thousands of pointless little websites that all linked to his main site. Get this: he also told me that the difference in income between the seventh and eighth spots on "first time homebuyer," a relatively unpopular search, affected his income to the tune of $20,000 PER MONTH! Google is powerful . . .
Interesting how this author's own site has a Google PR of 2. There's some high quality advice.
Past two weeks I need some images about body building, gym etc. I went google for search, after 20 pages I did not satisfied. Then I try to my chance to altavista.
Altavista gives more and very differend (and preffered) results. I do some check with different image categories.
It seems Altavista gives better results than google.
Is it just me ?
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Remember, this is a patent which requires no working model. In other words, this could be how Google *envisions* their search working as much as it indentifies any of the things it does do.
For a server registered in Santa Mesa CA, and an author who is supposed to be "Darren Yates: Search Engine Marketing expert. Celebrating 11 years on the Net in 2005.", it's disappointing to have to wade through all the syntactical and flow problems in his writing.
I'm not perfect, either, but I try to make sure that stuff I post is at least grammatically correct, and I go back and fix items that aren't. Maybe the article would make more sense if you didn't have to reread so many chunks of it.
antipaucity
Information Retrieval Based on Historical-data
Do /. editors accept these frequent puffs for SEO sites for money I wonder?
That patent number was filed two years ago, and you can view it online: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=200500717 41&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741
I guess it will not help, since links from slashdot have the rel="nofollow" that make them not valid for ranking. This helps minimize the comentary spam bots that run arround the net. My site was hit ny one of those, two or three times.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
From someone who knows the patent system intimately, this patent won't be issued. It is a bit too late for Google. Once something is public knowledge, then the inventor has a maximum of one year to file a patent application for that. This should have been filed 4-5 years ago. This patent will only help Google clones and competitors. Thanks for digging your own grave Google. "Survival of the smartest".
From TFA: This is a major factor so I'll take a few paragraphs to explain what is going on.
Then why don't you fucking not double-space every single sentence from each other?
It's really, really annoying.
It also doesn't make paragraphs.
The whole article is like this.
Sigh...
I always thought that Google should implement some kind of user rating system for it's search results. I mean, put "relevance" rating radio buttons (1 to 5) underneath the link, and allow "logged-in" google users to rank each link. Google users could then have the choice of seeing their search results filtered through "user ratings" or not. And because this system will obviously be abused, allow users to rate other users ratings, much like slashdot does with it's meta moderation. Would this not produce the highest quality google results over time?
</patent pending 2005 by ylikone>
Google, if you use this idea, you owe me big time. As payment, I take money orders and Paypal. Thanks!
Meh.
OK, so there aren't that many sites like mine, let alone sites that update daily over a period of years and include their entire archive on the site that grows daily. On the other hand, to my knowledge from doing searches on Google, I have very few site that link to mine, and I thought that counted highly with Google. So basically without trying to game the system, let alone advertise my site (other than incidentally in comments like this), I've been treated really well by Google.
In my case, it must be the longevity issue coupled with the scarcity of sites like mine. It sure ain't the links to my site.
...that whole pigeon thing was a joke? I can't believe it. Maybe this filing just a way to divert our attention?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Interesting. This means that registering domain names as soon as I think of them, even though I tend to not get around to actually building the site for them for a while, is to my advantage (and not just for the sake of securing the name). I have one domain that I registered four years ago, but didn't have time to put anything more than a simple placeholder site on it until now. Now that I finally have it going, Google may like it better than if I'd waited.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch- bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=200500717 41&OS=20050071741&RS=20050071741/ United States Patent Office - Patent 20050071741
and
US Patent Office Link http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/
I have a website with a robot.txt begging for the Googlespiderbot to come by, and it still hasn't.
Have you got the site listed in one of the major directories (Yahoo, Dmoz, etc)? Have you tried setting it as your Homepage in your Slashdot preferences?
And thanks for the flame mods. I do appreciate it. I love wasting modpoints of those with nothing valuable to contribute. I figure it is my way of helping the mod system as a whole.
Please slap some downmods on this one too!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Hope you meant 303... 403 is Forbidden. :-)
rooooar
Ha! In Soviet Russia, cowards anonymize YOU!!
I could barely get through that article because it was so horribly written.
"As well as the number, quality and anchor text factors of a link."
WFT kind of sentence is that!?
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
How do you know that they aren't already doing this? How would you detect it if they were?
Wow, so you are the one that is always pissing me off.
I once worked at a site and we had to take a lot of the nice looking CSS out becuase people werent smart enough to know what was a link and what wasn't.
I should not have to analyze you site to determine where the links are. It should be stunningly obvious. If people are complaining that they can not find the links, you have designed your site wrong.
Then again, our customer base was so dumb one guy actually faxed us to ask for out phone number becuase the number on the site, basically like this: 1-800-PRODUCTS
Why list the phone number as 1-800-PRODUCTS, when it is actually 1-800-PRODUCT? You listed an incorrect phone number, then when someone points this out, you call them stupid?
Speaking of being the one that pisses me off...
I used the word "PRODUCT" because is a generic name and then i'm not splashing the name of the company all over the place, a name you couldn't spell with seven letters.
should not have to analyze you site to determine where the links are
Holy christ! You must be bucking for promotion for a "youngest project manager in the organization" or something! You just jumped directly to blaming the developers without more evidence of what the hell you were being told!
Either that, or youre a disciple of that Most-Hated Blowhard Jacob "Don't Make Me Think Beyond The Brainstem" Neilsen.
The links were actually changed to a non-eye burning shade of blue to
Things like article titles and Product names... That's a fairly universal convention, even was back in 2000, and they still weren't smart enough to click on them until big "Click Here" buttons were put everywhere.
I wasn't gonna make this a flame, but screw it:
s'wut i sed.
I'm evil and want my small business competitor to drop in the rankings.
I set up a link-exchange farm and make sure he's listed prominently.
POOF he's branded a spammer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Alrighty folks, you know the drill! Google filed a patent, ready pitchforks!!
"Derp de derp."
If Google has been providing unencumbered, public access to the service for over a year?
My pagerank has declined but my traffic has doubled from Google. Does pagerank really matter? I find that writing relevant content for my users works. Has anybody challenged Googles patent and will it stand up to challenge. Surely if Pagerank really worked it would be completely commercialised by now and you could buy links from high rank pages. Google will decline if it doesent get rid of crap results. At the moment though with their reliance on Adsense it might not be in their interest to penalise the 'AskJeeves' type adserver sites. Maybe its time to publish a blacklist of sites that people can download to their browser that would work with Googles API to just not show these sites in the SERPs http://www.node-net.com/
I can't wait for the day that Google is overtaken by its competitors. It much easier to get ranked in MSN and Yahoo, so I suggest more people optimize for those engines to bring the Google giant to its knees.
Health Insurance Quotes
403 is not "Permanently moved", 301 is. See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10. html.
403 means "Forbidden". Maybe that mistake is the root of all your problems.
I posted a binary for mod_proxy_html at my site along with a how to on compiling it and was listed on Google's front page (currently number 5) within a week. It was a small project that a major aerospace company needed. They actually found my page through Google before we notified them it was there by e-mail.
Submitting the site to Google is a negative in their algorithm. Back when I had therabbithole.redback.inficad.com for my domain name Google found my site within a month.
You can't be successful in a vacuum. If you can't afford advertising and actually have a good site, then you join newsgroups and forums related to your site and become an active productive member. That's how my site got big initially. I linked to it in my sig on a major forum that I was active on.
Five years later I have a very large very diverse web-site and anything I post on it gets indexed (sometimes very highly) within a week. I'm currently one of the top results for Numa Numa Lyrics and Saaya Irie. It took less than a week for even Yahoo to put it at the number one result for the latter. It's since dropped a notch.
I think if you actually ran a site, you'd have a much better outlook on how Google and other major search engines operate. You don't have to spam anybody to get hits. You have to be proactive and useful. Oh yes, and patient.
Work Safe Porn
For example, let's search Google for "london hotels", a common search phrase. The first return is LondonNights.com. "Whois" returns "Worldview Ltd, 16 Marine Road West, Morecambe, LA3 1BS, Lancs, GREAT BRITAIN (UK)."
That's a UK company, so we look it up at Companies House., where we find "WORLDVIEW LIMITED, 16 MARINE ROAD WEST, MORECAMBE, LANCASHIRE LA3 1BS, Company No. 04588973". So we have a match on a registered company.
We check further with Dun and Bradstreet, which has a worldwide database of companies. We find "WORLDVIEW LTD 16 MARINE RD WEST MORECAMBE , UK Type of Location: single"
So they pass company validation, and we can get financial information about them.
Now let's try a domain that just appeared in a spam: "fleagroups.com". "Whois" gives us "Flea Market Groups. 126 73rd Ave N., Coral Springs, Florida 34992. US" So we go to Sunbiz, the Florida State Division of Corporations, and search. No "Flea Market Groups" under fictitions names. No match on address under anything beginning with "Flea". No "Flea Market Groups" under corporations, and no "Flea Market *" address matches.
Looking in Dun and Bradstreet, there are "Flea Market *" hits, but no exact match and no address match.
So they fail company validation. Add to probable spammer list, drop search engine ranking.
This is a reasonable test for any site that appears to be selling something.
Kind of reminds me of a science fiction story I read as a kid... this engineer is walking down the road when he sees a guy peddling toy saucers based on anti-gravity devices. After watching the demonstration, he buys one and is taught the trick, a piece of black thread inobtrusively linked to a pully, that the switch just powers some lights and sounds on the saucer. The engineer smiles and says it will make for a fun trick for the kids. The narrative then follows the vendor home where he says tells a man at a workbench that he sold 15 units that day and why the hell were they selling these saucers for $5 each when they cost $100 to make? The man at the workbench smiles and explains that somewhere out there, some bright individual is going to notice that operating the saucer without flipping the switch results in a broken thread. The inventor has never been able to get his device to output more than a small fraction of anti-gravity, but one day, someone will figure out how to improve the process whereupon he can leverage the patent he's got filed... ^_^ It was an amusing twist in the story to me.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Links from blogs.
This is about software patents after all.
Oh, wait, they're a good thing when Google or Apple apply for them. Sorry, I thought you said Yahoo!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I've also noticed some ranking changes in my webpage. My webpage showed up in Google at third/forth place. Then I putted some Google Ads on it and registered it on Google Adsense. Guess what? First place now.
While others have commented on the author's horribly bad grammar and style, I wonder what he means by getting better Google page rankings if you get people to bookmark your site? I'm consused. How can Google know if I bookmark a site?
Kriston
(it is being funny)
I help run The Mail Archive which is one of the larger mailing list archive sites, covering several thousand lists. What specifically would you like to see improved about navigation?
The AC is saying they don't appreciate the line of work you are in. He/she believes it to have an overall negative impact on search engine sites. Now you can try and justify that you're not doing anything wrong by just providing a service to a paying client, but... that's not going to negate the accurate point AC is making. The clear point (that you still won't get or accept) is that SEO, spam, porn, etc. It's all gutter stuff. Leeches on society. You've chosen to be part of that.
So I've got this site for listing people you hate - http://peoplethatsuck.net/ - and I ran into a kinda funny issue: When somebody makes an entry, it almost always appears at the top of Google, and the person being listed will almost always find it. The exceptions are names of famous people who have a lot of pages about them. Now, I knew this page was going to be famous, simply because everyone wants to let the world know who they hate, but this is peculiar because now it can actually can do a number on the listee's reputation.
& q=spokker+jones&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8. This is the name of an author on Something Awful I particularly disliked. You'll see that my entry is the first result. So, soon enough, Spokker found it, and I got a flood of people from SA after he - apparently - posted a reprisal rant that I couldn't view without a membership. It was really quite fun, and I got almost a thousand hits that way >:)
A prime example - search "spokker jones" on google - http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
ownd
Turns out, this all happened because the entry is linked from the main page, the link's title is the person's name, and the entry page's title is also the person's name, and of course the name is said in the contents and the comments.
Just thought I'd mention it, though I'd hate for this info to fall into spammers' hands. Someone actually asked me to take a name down once because it was screwing with the listee's reputation more than she'd expected. Yowser
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
But I'm no leach on society, thats for damn sure. I don't employ unethical tactics. I don't try to strech the definition of the products that I promote. I get people with good relevant content get recognized when they're supposed to be recognized.
I know I'm not going to convert anyone here into an SEO true believer, because this is a really idealistic place. But I'll be damned if I'm going to lay down and be told that I should "accept" that I am a leech on society when I have nothing in common with the unethical SEO's described here other than a job title.If google can actually make this work out I can only hope that the black hat SEO will someday become obsolete. Reading the way they determine page rank it seems the best way to gain rank is to simply build a good site and advertise it intelligently rather than just spamming. Of course, whether or not they are actually using all these techniques is another thing altogether. I'm still hoping the pigeon explanation is truthfull.
Did you notice that there are to few "o's" in to few or to small?
-Spelling Nazi
PS Hey, it was on the second page of the article, so at least I READ it....
But I'm no leach on society, thats for damn sure. I don't employ unethical tactics. I don't try to strech the definition of the products that I promote. I get people with good relevant content get recognized when they're supposed to be recognized.
:)
I know I'm not going to convert anyone here into an SEO true believer, because this is a really idealistic place. But I'll be damned if I'm going to lay down and be told that I should "accept" that I am a leech on society when I have nothing in common with the unethical SEO's described here other than a job title.
At this point, I am more than happy to concede, that I have NO idea what your personal ethics are. And I agree with your semantics statements. It is not fair that I auto lumped you in with the dirt bags of the profession. I have to defend my position by saying, your replies about what "you" did, I honestly did take as what "you" did, not in the "royal" sense.
You could well be a wonderful designer, who has ethics, and only accepts ethical clients. If that is the case, I applaud you. I have a lot of respect for people who work hard at making their clients site's better looking, easier to navigate, and more consistent with their users needs, and expectations. I love to see the "best" result as number one. It makes me smile. If your clients deserve their rankings, and you were able to help with that, without resorting to the bag of hidden tricks, my hats off to you.
I also do not believe that you are a leech. You provide a service, and people willfuly make use of that service, and pay you accordingly. That is fair enough. If you are ethical in your methods, and choice of clients, then optimize away. If what you say is true, then if nothing else, you are at least doing your part to remove some of the stink that exists on your profession.
I never intended this to be a flame war, but it looks like my passion for purity in search, has slammed up against your passion for your SEO work. Mix that in with a pair of cynics, and things get a little "out there".
PS - I only used that insulting crap at the end of my previous post, to get you to reply back. Its a dirty trick, since no one takes us AC's seriously. Kind of like a brand new site, with kick ass content. Think about it as "Slashdot post reply optimization". Smile, it's a little topical joke
This might explain why my dusty old site keeps getting such high rankings. It's linked to by some other dusty old sites which would also be ranked high because of their antiquity.
solar+system+simulation
#2 (after NASA) out of 1,120,000
I will cling to my belief that the high ranking reflects the greatness of my site.
It must be annoying as hell to get an algo together and implement it only to see your results decay underneath the unrelenting wave of unethical asshats. I know I would be pissed as hell if I built a site for baby wipes and it started showing as results for Kiddie porn.
I really didn't want to flame on either, yet I felt compelled. I bet we amused the hell out of a few people.Man, I'm going to have to steal your "Slashdot post reply optimization" line and use it as my sig, that jazz is funny.
BTW, how bad do you hate trackback?So I get the following:
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Google's Site Ranking algorithms reveal how hard they are making it for spam sites to get listed (on Google).
And provides a list of techniques for spam sites to use that guarantee them positions on every search engine but Google (in fact, if you use these techniques it's illegal for other search engines to penalize you for them.
This could be an especially evil technique for spammers.
I've been wondering the same thing about a site I manage for a good local college: www.bristolmassage.co.uk
It's a highly relevant site for the subject in a particular city, and in all honesty should be on the first page if not the first position for several searches which include the city's name and variations on the subject. But it's nowhere near there.
I have both the .com and .co.uk registered, and the .com permanently redirects to .co.uk, so that everyone's bookmarks consistently refer to the .co.uk - it's local after all, and URL consistency is good. And I'd like the .co.uk to appear on Google's results, rather than the .com.
Because of the surprisingly low ranking (at the moment) I've been wondering if the .com registration and redirect is the cause.
Thanks for mentioning that you've noticed what I was thinking. I shall change the .com to display the same pages as the .co.uk, and see what happens after a month or two. I still wonder whether the .com's pages should link to other pages in the .com site, or have exactly the same links, i.e. to the .co.uk pages.
Anyone else notice redirects like this causing significantly lower Google rankings? I did the redirect because it seemed the right thing for a 'good citizen' site to do, but it's not going to stay if it attracts that sort of penalty.
Cheers,
-- Jamie
ps. And yes, I did include the link as a cheeky one-off link-farm ;-) But the post is relevant and my question genuine.
Actually, I think the answer is that you buy Google's AdWords advertising - then your commercial site comes up as a link when they search for garden tools in your region - and you get the exposure you want. Relying on your rank in a search engine for advertising isn't the solution. Just look at how many people complain every time Google changes its algorithms! If it's that important to you, just buy the advertising!
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Please apply to work at Google.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
James Salsman
What's wrong with using perfectly legitimate, standards-compliant HTML to make your site easier to read by search engines? "White-hat" SEO is using structured markup, ensuring that your text is text and not images or embedded Flash, putting style in CSS where it belongs, and all the other techniques the Slashdot crowd generally considers Good Things (TM). This is what Irish Samurai claims to be doing, and if that's true, he should be thanked for it.
If other businesses that fall in ranking are worried, they can invest a little time and/or money to clean up their site's code, and they'll end up right where they should be - ranked according to $SEARCH_ENGINE_MARKET_LEADER's impartial, best judgment. The search engine will be able to deliver more accurate results, the user gets the information they want, the businesses in question get traffic most likely to result in a sale, and the quality of the World Wide Web in general increases because everybody uses good markup.
I see nothing wrong with any of this.
The only way I can think of to make it funnier is if the downmods got metamoderated Unfair.
Oh...whatdya know...
Muchos dankes :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year