Anyone familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques? I have a mystery.

[Steve Kinney]

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On 09/12/2015 09:07 AM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:

[...]

> The best defense against this is may be to better advertise
> what they are trying to drown out with the spam, either
> intentionally or not.

Exactly.

Google employs two contractors with an army of humans to review
websites for "quality". Among other things they check for keyword
stuffing, hidden text irrelevant to the site's content, etc.; on
discovery, offending sites are de-rated and "sandboxed" so that
only searches for the exact URL of the offender's site appear in
Google search results. But an SEO contractor with hundreds of
totally ignorant clients (i.e., hundreds of clients) can spread a
well paid (or personal grudge based) suppression campaign like the
one described across hundreds of domains to keep the spam alive
and working.

The distribution of "search spam" that is referenced here could be
bad luck - some sleazy SEO contractor cut and pasted the text just
because it was natural language and contained specific terms
relevant to some of their customers' sites.  Or, and IMO more
likely, someone contracted to have the info in question removed
from the Internet by poisoning search indexes.

Either way, if you put up a web page that has the relevant text in
it, that page should rise above the irrelevant crap in search
results within a couple of months.  The specific search terms you
want to become findable should be included in an H1 header at or
near the top of the page, and in the first paragraph.  Naming an
image on the page to include these words is an undocumented but
effective trick.  The same words and phrases should be included in
the "description" meta-tag field of the page header.  (The
"keywords" meta-tag is ignored by search engines that use natural
language analysis to categorize pages, i.e. all search engines today
.)

For best results, ask folks on THIS list (and elsewhere) to go out
of their way to put links to your own counter-attacking page on
their own websites, with search terms that have been poisoned by
the SEO contractor as the visible text of the hyperlink.  Links on
a half dozen pages with Google page ranks of 2 or above can work
wonders.

Much as I hate to say this, setting up a Google Analytics account
and adding their tracking code to your counter-attack page is a
good idea, because pages with the analytics.js code will get
crawled and indexed faster.  People who "care about privacy" won't
be affected because their browsers won't download or execute the
javascript.

A saboteur who has to hide his weaponized text from human website
visitors (and the "owners" of the websites used) can't compete
against well formed, visible text on pages that have lots of
inbound links from "real" websites.

Google is very up front about how most of their page indexing and
ranking protocols work:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-sta
rter-guide.pdf

:o)






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