[thelist] More on Search Engines

Russ russ at unrealisticexpectations.com
Wed Dec 10 00:21:58 CST 2003


I'm probably going to cause a lot of problems by noting this, but...

There's a company (http://www.brainfusionstudios.com) out there that has
performed a "trick" that appears as if it won't get them into trouble
with the search engines, because it's somewhat legit from a spider's
view--at least in my understanding of how spiders work.

Remember that spiders really don't see things like colors and images,
but they read pages a lot like a text-only browser, if I'm recalling my
SEO information correctly.

Start here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=brainfusionst
udios

Check out some of the links like "denver dating service".

The real link (since the above is timing out for me) redirects you
through http://brainfusionstudios.com/sales/denvergraphicdesign.htm.
This page uses some type of technology (I'm guessing CGI) that actually
writes text to the page based upon what you've searched/clicked on--in
this case, denvergraphicdesign--populates the copy on the page
accordingly.

Take a moment and stop your browser on the denvergraphicdesign.htm page
and view the source.  The same happens for chicagographicdesign.htm and
others.

Now, this is where it gets fun.

There's a div with an ID of "zyx".  "zyx" comes from a linked style
sheet at:  http://brainfusionstudios.com/zyx.css.

That style is:  #zyx { position:absolute; left:-405px; top:-210px;
width:400px; height:200px; z-index:1}

What brainfusionstudios.com has done is placed copy at -405,
-210--that's right, above and to the left of your browsers viewable
space--so that you cannot see it with a modern browser.  This is
somewhat of a risk for anyone viewing the pages with a text browser
(lynx viewer version:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrainfusionstud
ios.com%2Fsales%2Fdenvergraphicdesign.htm) as they'll get to see
everything on the page, however...

They've created TONS of links to themselves this way--probably
unbeknownst to some of their clients and to the rest of the world, but
it should increase their link popularity and their site popularity
WITHOUT appearing to be directing everything to one single page since
the content gets rewritten, as well.

Granted, I'm making some semi-educated guesses here, but these guys
appear to be legitimately beating the system by fooling any relatively
modern browser into not seeing the copy.  Anyone using a text based
browser--or heaven forbid--a person with a disability would find a lot
of this stuff useless, but most of it is out of the way.

It certainly does explain how www.sinatrafamily.com makes it to page 2
of the Google search results for "Chicago Web Design" however
(http://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+web+design&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe
=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N) and might explain why some of the results seem out
of whack in certain areas.

I've probably not answered any questions, and I apologize for that--it
all seems relevant in regards to how Google has changed things and
people appear to be getting strange results.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org 
> [mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Michael Dinowitz
> Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 9:58 PM
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: Re: [thelist] "spamminess" site check - realtymort.com
> 
> 
> I have the problem even worse. House of Fusion 
> (www.houseoffusion.com) has been
> a major ColdFusion community site for almost 8 years now and 
> if you do a search
> for ColdFusion on Google, we don't even come up. We do have 
> several tens of
> thousands of links indexed by google (I run and archive some 
> very large volume
> mailing lists), but none under the most basic keyword.
> 
> 
> > Hi evolters --
> >
> > I work for a company that has had a website for a number of years.
> > We've never had _great_ ranking on Google, but we've always 
> been there.
> >
> > The boss-man is absolutely driven to raise the rankings in search
> > engines (I explained to him that Google's entire business 
> model depends
> > on web coders not being able to directly manipulate the 
> rankings, but
> > he doesn't want to hear it...), so he keeps insisting that I keep
> > tweaking word order in Title tags and such, in a vain 
> attempt to find
> > the perfect "keyword" optimization.
> >
> > In an attempt to help this issue (and several other such as browser
> > compatibility), I rewrote the site about six months ago using pure
> > XHTML and CSS, which among other things majorly increase the
> > content-to-noise ratio of the pages, improved structure, etc....
> >
> > We've hovered around 80th place when searching for the 
> phrase "chicago
> > apartments" (it's primarily a building management company).  Google
> > redesigned their algorithm in November, and suddenly the page is
> > nowhere to be found!  It pops up if I search very 
> specifically (as in
> > the specific company name) so we're still in the database, 
> but we don't
> > show up anywhere under various types of keyword searches.
> >
> > Here is the site:
> > <http://www.realtymort.com/>
> >
> > I thought the site was well done in terms of readabiloity to search
> > engines and such, and I'm not doing anything blatantly 
> "spammy", AFAIK.
> >   Am I missing something?  Is there something I'm doing 
> horribly wrong
> > here?
> >
> > Notes:
> > 1) The Site Map is brand-spanking new (as in, "yesterday"), 
> so that's
> > not part of the issue.  I added that in attempt to alleviate the
> > problem.  Bad move or good move?
> >
> > 2) There are two domains pointing to the same site, so that 
> may be part
> > of the problem (but wasn't before).  
> <http://www.aptrentals.com/> goes
> > to the same site.
> >
> > 3) 
> The words "Chicago Apartments" was recently added to the beginning
> > of all page titles... not sure if this is the problem or 
> not, just an
> > FYI.  Doesn't seem to be too terrible of a crime, but 
> slightly "spammy"
> >
> > Please take a look.  All advice is appreciated.
> >
> > More generally, do you all know of a good source of "search engine
> > optimization" advice?



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