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Google Businesses The Internet

A Search Engine Manipulator's Tale 287

Posted by Zonk from the skeezy dept.
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."
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A Search Engine Manipulator's Tale More

A Search Engine Manipulator's Tale

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  • Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lecithin ( 745575 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @01:59PM (#11977330)
    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.
    • 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.
      • Try searching for a review of any piece of computer hardware or any consumer electrical goods. The vast majority of hits are to price comparison or ecommerce websites that allow users to add reviews. That wouldn't be so bad, but the vast majority of them don't have user reviews of the stuff I'm looking for.

    • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:07PM (#11977414)
      Just subtract terms from every search to cut out the crap. Compare a search with the same search using these additional keywords:

      -buy -price -checkout -sale -shop

      I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

      • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lecithin ( 745575 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:12PM (#11977470)
        Yep, you could do that, and I do.

        But, if you are looking for something specific that is published, you may not get the results you want.

        An example may be that you are looking for information on a nebula. By using the "-" keywords above, you would get rid of places like space.com, skyandtelescope.com, possibly universities and other places that advertise and have subscriptions for their information.

        I don't think that taking away keywords is a good answer to me.

        • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:4, Informative)

          by micromoog ( 206608 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:22PM (#11977578)
          But the original results for "nebula" were pretty good anyway ;)

          Seriously, though, a combination of selectively subtracting "junk" words like these, along with using several keywords to narrow it down, seems to work well. Particularly, enclosing multi-word phrases in quotes makes a HUGE difference sometimes.

          It's not perfect, and it is extra effort and annoying when you end up at trash no-content sites, but Google still does a good job for me overall.

        • At the end of the day it's all about money. Google may not be bad guys but they're in it for the money. As long as the vast bulk of users go straight to Google they've got no incentive to spend money to refine their search algorythms for the uber techies like yourself.

          But that reminds me of another IT name that became the de-facto standard and the response to that was for the uber techies to create their own. Maybe we want/need a Linux type competitor to Google where quality is the driver? If only....

      • Alternatively, you could purchase DEVONAgent [devon-technologies.com], which searches many engines, and then integrates the results, removing redundant, and/or unrelated links before presenting you with the results (ordered by relevancy).

        No, it's not free, and yes, it's only for the Mac, but it's a good example of how many people are finding the information they need, without getting bogged down in this "My site ranks higher than yours" mentality, which seems to be permeating Google lately. Copernic for the PC used to be free, a
      • That's a really good idea. I would like to see something like that built into google (ie. a checkbox next to the seach box along the lines of "filter out commercial sites"). Google could then look for keywords that indicate that they are trying to sell you something and remove the offending pages from the results. This would benefit the user by giving better searches, and benefit google by giving more attention to their own ads. They probably already have the algorithms to do this from froogle.

        I personally
    • The ideal would be to present only advertising that is relevant to you, although the trick of marketing is to figure out how to make anything relevant to you.

      While people should be free to do whatever they want with their webpages -- it being the job of the search engine to do the work of sorting -- this tactic of "optimizing for search engines" only has a point if the website is actually indicated in some form in the search topics. Online marketers just don't get that, and seem to figure one pair of eye

      • The ideal would be a world where I go tell people what I want and people showing me they can meet that want rather than a world where people are telling me I want what they are offering. Especially if it is "targeted" because they'll be targeting me with things that I might like but don't really need. Insidious!

    • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@@@yahoo...com> on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:11PM (#11977461)
      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?

      • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:4, Informative)

        by NevDull ( 170554 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:38PM (#11977761) Homepage Journal
        The Teoma engine (which powers AskJeeves) produces results that appear to be far better filtered than Google. It also produces fewer results, from a smaller number of total pages, but... depending on the term, it can give quite nice results.
        • 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.

      • Re:Search Engines just Advertising Now? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by wbm6k ( 593413 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:39PM (#11977782)
        Of course, the other amazing thing is that people continue to use Google over other search engines despite this issue [SNIP]. I haven't used many other search engines lately - are any of them really any better?

        Of course, the really amazing thing is that you freely admit there is a problem with Google, that it does not do what you want it to, and yet you still haven't checked out the alternatives.

        Which shows that it isn't amazing at all; people don't perform a web search these days--they google something. The site has become synonymous with the task, and I suspect it will take a MAJOR problem (on the order of institutionalized censoring by Google) to change that.
        • Seems like what we really need is a distributed search engine (a la bittorrent) with a PGP Web of Trust [rubin.ch] 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 wh
    • There really is no efficient way to hide from the spammers now... as good as any search engine is... once it gains popularity its like sending up the batsignal... or rather... in this sense it would be the spam signal. where there is traffic there will be spam. i dont think there will ever be an effective remedy for that.

      LOOK, ITS THE SPAM SIGNAL!!

  • Call these people by their real titles please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @01:59PM (#11977333)

    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

  • On no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:00PM (#11977334) Journal
    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*

    • Re:On no (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:05PM (#11977388)
      perhaps you'd appreciate this then too. HOT GAY COCK [suso.org]

      • Re:On no (Score:5, Funny)

        by suso ( 153703 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:06PM (#11977407) Journal
        Thanks a lot.
        • It's a good think you fixed the typo in:

          no disk quotas

        • Get him, boys! (Score:5, Funny)

          by TiggertheMad ( 556308 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:54PM (#11977977) Journal
          Why would you post a link to his site that says HOT GAY COCK [suso.org]? I looked at the site and there isn't any mention of HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] on it. I mean, I've never been to a HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] page before, but I can imagine what a HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] site looks like. I mean, it doesn't even seem close to a HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] site. First off, there needs to be a lot more HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] on the site. And when I say more, I mean at least one HOT GAY COCK [suso.org]. There isn't even one single HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] to be found.

          Now, you may find yorself suddenly at the top of Googles rankings for HOT GAY COCK [suso.org]. Don't thank me, just convert your hosting businuess over to a pr0n site that has HOT GAY COCK [suso.org], rake in the cash, and send me a cut. Afterall, Does your hosting businuess really make more money than a HOT GAY COCK [suso.org] 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 /., 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.

          (mods: this honestly isn't a troll, read the parent and grandparent posting.)
      • That is the funniest fucking thing I've seen on here in a long, long time.... KUDOS, Anonymous Coward!

      • Re:On no (Score:3, Funny)

        by IpSo_ ( 21711 )
        I used to work in the large hosting business, and the gay porn sites were usually premium customers to have. The running joke around the office was if we ever wanted to make quick cash, it would be to get in the gay porn business.

        You wouldn't believe how much traffic they push, and the money they are willing to spend on servers.

        Of course, the problem was always if they called support and complained that their images weren't showing up...

        God bless Lynx. ;)

    • Re:On no (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MyLongNickName ( 822545 )
      Unless I am mistaken, your sig is not picked up by Google. Sorry.
      • Actually, you're right. I forgot that non-login accounts don't see signatures here. It must be from another forum that I have that sig on then (like gentoo forums)

    • nip it in the bud (Score:5, Informative)

      by temojen ( 678985 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:17PM (#11977528) Journal
      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.

  • search engines can be manipulated? Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:01PM (#11977350)
    What a miserable failure! [google.com]

  • Misleading (Score:5, Informative)

    by duffer_01 ( 184844 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:01PM (#11977358) Homepage
    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/ [iprcom.com]
    that tries to explain exactly how bad these link exchanges can be (at least from the Google perspective).
    • 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.
    • The article is also one-sided, because they talk about what spammers do without interviewing anybody from a search engine to see how they fight back. At a colloquium I asked David Cohn, google's director of search results, how much they worried about Microsoft, and he said they worry more about spammers. His job, and of those who work for him, is to fight in this arms race.

      That doesn't mean google is winning or will win, but search engines are not static targets like this article implies. People talk a

  • Not quite that easy. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:02PM (#11977364)
    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 [linkadage.com] 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.

    • Re:Not quite that easy. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by voma ( 850099 )
      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
      • Nobody besides Google insiders know exactly what they do, but I've heard the same thing. I'm not sure I believe it though for the simple reason that:

        Competitor A is #1 for "widgets"
        Unscrupulous Competitor B is #2 for "widgets"

        Being unscrupulous and wanting the #1 position, Competitor B submits Competitor A's site to various link farms.

        If that did penalize a site, I think we'd be hearing about it happening all the time.
      • 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.

        So what I need to do is to put my competitor's links there, right?
  • ... but this is getting silly! Still interesting, but kinda silly.

    Good old googledot [googledot.org].

  • Relevance of Google Search Results (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iBod ( 534920 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:07PM (#11977415)
    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.
    • Perhaps you and I are searching for different things. I'm looking through my history at the last dozen or so requests to Google and in each case I found what I was looking for on the first page, often right at the top.

      What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".

      Kind of a diverse set of things, but they were rather specific. Often I'm looking for trivia, or a particular product. A little bit of convenie
      • I use Google a lot more than two dozen times a day (admittedly for somewhat less esoteric subjects than yourself) and from my perspective the quality of results has definitely degraded.
        • I often google for technical information, and I find it's useful to put the relevant standards organization first ie "w3c CSS table-cell" otherwise ("CSS table-cell") you get oodles of hits to junk sites like w3schools.
          • Yeah good tip, but often I need (or my customers need) to Google for non-tech info.

            For the stuff that most people Google for, the SERPS are becoming flooded with total crap.

      • What was I looking for? "Founder sabermetrics". "french english dictionary". "oprah runner's world cover". "jprofiler". "hiroshima kilotons".

        That was a rare (and frightening!) look inside someone else's brain. Thank you.

    • It also ranks mailing-list messages about certain software packages above the manual or official site for the package.

  • Was it just me... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thirteenVA ( 759860 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:08PM (#11977423)
    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.
    • It was just another way for him to increase his visibility, and for his company too.

      He manipulated Wired and used them to "optimize" search engines, while preaching to them about search engine optimization. It's quite brilliant really.

  • Yes, indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by WillerZ ( 814133 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:08PM (#11977430) Homepage
    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.

  • Uncritical (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slavemowgli ( 585321 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:09PM (#11977441) Homepage
    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.

    • Misleading Robots for Fun and Profit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:44PM (#11977859) Journal
      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.

    • Um.....because they wouldn't have been able to get an interview with him EVER if they called him what he really was and were more critical. Would YOU go get interviewed by Wired if you knew they were just going to attack you?

  • Content based ranking (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jovian_Storm ( 862763 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:10PM (#11977448) Homepage
    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.

  • I've waded in this industry.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:10PM (#11977451)
    "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.

  • I like to confuse the search engines (Score:5, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:12PM (#11977472)
    By putting my servers in different positions in the server room a couple of times a week

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:12PM (#11977477)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I agree. Since I personally have looked to Google as my own personal card catalogue for the past 5yrs or so, I get very upset that these morons are breaking it. Let's put the best Slashdot minds together and offer Google suggestions on how to improve the results we get. Most of the suggestions will probably be implemented already, or worthless, but to get at diamonds you have to turn a lot of dirt.

      I'll go first:

      - ignore all but the first three or four meta-tags, with the reasoning that someone selling
  • Another Google related story?? This is probably the 4th in just two days!!
    I'm thinking about editing my preferences NOT to show anything related to Google anymore.
    Enough is enough.
    Somebody plese fork Slashdot to Googledot or google.slashdot.org
    • Let's ignore the fact this was not only about google, and assume it is...

      So would you also say to [insert your news source here] "Quit doing stories on the Election , I've heard enough", or "I only cared about the war for 3 stories, who the fuck cares now? 4 is just too many"

      If you don't want to read the google stories, don't read them. News is news, no matter what it is about.
  • 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.

  • lets test his theory.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mark19960 ( 539856 ) <[moc.gnillibyrtnuocwol] [ta] [kraM]> on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:14PM (#11977498) Journal
    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.

  • Use nofollow! (Score:5, Informative)

    by sho222 ( 834270 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:20PM (#11977561)
    Back in January Slashdot ran an article [slashdot.org] 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.

    • Re:Use nofollow! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MaufTarkie ( 6625 )

      For all of you out there creating blog/board software and maintaining blog sites, please use this attribute! (/. inlcluded, I suppose)

      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 [slashdot.org] and now half the outgoing links are crossed out.

      Apparently, my link is, too. Perhaps only subscribers can have non-norel links?

  • Sadly, he's right - page ranking is easy to fake (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:21PM (#11977567) Homepage Journal
    Back when the national NOW [now.org] 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 [wanow.org] 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.

  • My Experience (Score:4, Informative)

    by DanielMarkham ( 765899 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:25PM (#11977613) Homepage
    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.

  • But my customers want me to spam SEs! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:28PM (#11977645)
    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.

    • "Google has made this so, I'm afraid."

      Not quite. Sleazy marketroids were abusing Yahoo! via META tags a decade ago. Rule #1 of the universe: sleazy marketroids (pardon me if that's redundant) will do whatever is possible to make sure their company name is in your face; screw your desires, the public good, and shared resources.

      Google (heh) for "tragedy of the commons." Short version: any time there are public resources freely available, abuses will follow by people who think their desires are more importan
  • It is true, that the top listing gets about 40% of the clicks.

    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 listi

  • Doesn't work like that (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:35PM (#11977729) Journal
    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.
  • Semantic web, baby! That would invalidate ballot stuffing.

  • How to report spam (Score:5, Informative)

    by GoogleGuy ( 754053 ) * on Friday March 18, 2005 @02:41PM (#11977809) Homepage
    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 [google.com].

    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.
  • Sure. If I could get every single page in Ohio to link to me my rankings would be schwweeeeeeeet! Or if I could get Yahoo to include a link to me......woo hoo!

    Problem is that none of that is practical or realistic, is it?

    • 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
  • The good thing is that, while it is indeed true that the search engines are manipulable, at least they do have workmanlike user interfaces.
  • He claims he's just being realistic. "The search engines created the monster," he said

    And there isn't a modern banking regulation system in place in third world countries either, so it's OK for the dictators and their friends and family to pillage the populace for their own gain. That's the end result of thinking like this guy. He's morally bankrupt but feels good about himself. Obviously a product of the publik edukashun sistim.
    • He's morally bankrupt but feels good about himself. Obviously a product of the publik edukashun sistim.

      How does this follow? Have you by any chance ever attended a private school?
  • they're spamming. really, how is this different than people getting spammed? it's happening, just in a different way. I dislike how cookies and such track users, although many sites need cookies to function. while I try to protect myself, I still feel like I'm vuln - and this article illistrates why!

    bo

  • This article doesn't even mention Google yet people in this thread believe SEO only applies to Google. There are three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.
  • And the Goebbels Euphemism Of The Year award goes to the guy who came up with the teasm "Search Engine Optimization"!

    --
    Elmwood [elmwoodstrip.org], a community blog

  • Possible Fix? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CodeBuster ( 516420 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @03:16PM (#11978230)
    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?

  • Making SEO SOL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eponymous Koward ( 868913 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @03:35PM (#11978483)
    Search engines have at least two options to deal with SEO.

    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.

  • A clear path to a good Google ranking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wintermute42 ( 710554 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @04:26PM (#11979096) Homepage

    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.

  • Google is completly broken (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bored ( 40072 ) on Friday March 18, 2005 @04:54PM (#11979362)
    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.

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