[thelist] Cheating Google?

Eric E lists at ettinger.net
Sun Dec 21 13:18:36 CST 2003


> because it's not raw content of each of
> those pages that Google and the robots look for to index 
> anyway, it's the "keywords", "description" and "content" 
> headers, plus linkages to other pages within and outside of 
> that site, and what's put into them, that's the key!

Actually, the "raw" content (text) on a site is one of the things at
which Google looks most closely - meta tags are becoming less and less
important - but they still do get read.

There is a myth that Google is ALL about links which is wrong. That is
just part of their algorithm, and some "campaigns" have made Google (and
others) aware of limitations of this facet of ranking criteria.

Also, the precept that by redirecting through Google the pages will get
indexed faster is erroneous. If Google sees users going to page that
isn't in their index, they'll be immediately suspicious, and if it's
already in the index, I can still think of 2 ways they could detect the
fraud. (Hint: If the URL is 'derived' from a user that didn't perform a
search - there is an issue.)

What we tell our clients is that if you invent the next great cheat, the
engines will just catch on and account for it in their algorithm. One of
the parameters that go into site building is user requirements. The best
thing to do is to familiarize yourself with the how the engines rank and
then just build that into your user requirements, the search engines are
users of Web sites.

Pax,
Eric

http://www.ettinger.net





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