[thelist] Re: Search Engines

[noah]

At 09:39 AM 26/11/2001, Shirley Kaiser, SKDesigns wrote:
>At 04:19 AM 11/26/2001, Øyvind Vestavik wrote:
>>or you can
>>insert the Codfish-word into your text many times. A sneaky way to do this
>>is to insert  "codfish" any number of times using extremelig small fonts
>>and the same font colour as your page background so that it won't be
>>vivible to the user, but the robot will give it a high ranking on searches
>>on "codfish". There is some information on how to "attract the attention"
>>of spiders on the homepages of individual search-engines (no-one obey the
>>same rules)  or you can check out http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
>
>One must be careful about doing things like this, though, as many of the 
>search engines spiders have already caught on to this trick, and if they 
>find your site guilty of "spamming" the search engines they'll end up 
>banning your site(s). So I personally wouldn't recommend doing things like 
>that. There are plenty of other ways to help your rankings without taking 
>that kind of risk.

Not that I agree with the strategy of hiding text to fool search engines, 
but I wonder if using CSS to hide the text (rather than <font> tags) would 
prevent spiders from realizing that the text is actually hidden and thus 
prevent the site from being penalized.

Cheers,
Noah