NY Times article: Dirty Little Secrets of Search

[SeaworthyGoods]

Greetings & Happy Valentines Day,
This lengthy Feb 12th article from the NYT is VERY interesting and explains quite a lot about how search engines work. It also explains how JC Penney got around the google system and what finally happened.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=general&src=me

Paula

[bobby131313]

Google bombing is nothing new. Been around for years and years. You can even get your (or someone elses') site ranked for words that don't even appear on the site at all.

[DSL Guy]

Google bombing is nothing new. Been around for years and years. You can even get your (or someone elses') site ranked for words that don't even appear on the site at all.

That's my biggest peeve, because I do a whole lot of product research. Too often I find sites way up on page 1 and even page 2 results for some obscure product and there is nothing on the page about the product. Check the cached page and it tells you "these terms appear only in links to this page"

It's possible the item was there at some point in the past but not at the time I checked it.

90% of the time when I do a search now, I go in through the cached page to make sure what I'm looking for is really there.

Yesterday I was looking up an obscure recording and every result could only give me a circa 197? date so I kept on searching till I pulled up an archived newspaper article in GoogleDocs to help me actually pinpoint the release year of the record based on the discography written on the cover of the record and the article. Until I found that Google Document there were 1000's of results coming up without full details I needed. Sheesh Google!

[tom paine]

An excellent article well worth the read. There's no doubt that black hat methods work in the short term but it risks the wrath of Google.

[tosommerfugle]

It would probably be a good idea to submit web spam reports (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-to-help-google-identify-web-spam.html) to Google when you see black hat footprints. They've even got a Chrome browser extension for this.

Too often I find sites way up on page 1 and even page 2 results for some obscure product and there is nothing on the page about the product.You can avoid that simply by prefixing the word(s) you require to be on the specific page by a plus sign. For marginal topics, Google does tend to use crosslinks to provide "possibly relevant" results instead of focusing strongly on on-page keywords.

In my experience (based on checking incoming organic Google traffic), this very often helps users who may not be very skilled in selecting "good" search words.