search engine insurance...

From: Danny Sullivan <danny_at_calafia.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Mar 1999 17:41:03 -0600 (CST)

Hi Everyone--

Richard asked me to comment on a "Search Engine Insurance" pitch
that's going around, which indirectly brings up issues involving link
popularity, Direct Hit, submitting to Yahoo and other fun topics.
Here's the summary from the pitch, which an O-A member got through
unsolicited email:


THE SPAM SAID:
> "Search Engine Insurance" can help protect your investment by
> keeping your hits up via our satellite sites. Thirty two of these
> satellite sites will shoot hits directly at your site to increase
> your "popularity rating" dramatically.
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This refers to increasing a site's link popularity rating.
Some search engines are using link popularity as a means to
improve their ranking algorithms. Google uses this the most
and uses it heavily. Infoseek, Excite, AltaVista and Inktomi
also make use of it to a much lesser degree. Having links
can help, but it won't be a guarantee.

Moreover, none of these players simply gives you a boost
because of the number of links. Link quality is taken into
account. A page with many links pointing at it is more
important than a page with no links pointing at it.
Likewise, a page with many links transmits more importance
to the pages it links to. So putting up 32 pages that link
to you isn't a help if those pages have no importance
themselves.

Yes, I suppose you can build a giant scheme to try and
increase the importance of the "satellite" pages to make
them also more important. But I doubt you'll see this work
for other reasons that are hard to go into. The short answer
is that link popularity is not just as simple as it sounds,
nor is it that heavy of a ranking criteria. I would strongly
recommend to anyone really worried about it that they invest
time building legit links to their sites. You'll get traffic
from them over time, and they may help you with the search
engines a little.

The pitch also makes things confusing by starting out with a
commentary about Direct Hit, which incidentally was taken
from my last newsletter, used without attribution and turns
my explanation of Direct Hit into a quote that seems to come
from HotBot.

Direct Hit measures user clickthrough and time spent
visiting a site, to help build its rankings. It is now the
primary source of results at HotBot. The satellite sites
mentioned in the pitch would do nothing to increase this
type of "popularity."

Somewhat related to this, Robert Woodhead wrote something
about Direct Hit that many people are wondering about:


ROBERT WOODHEAD WROTE:
> They claim that they have safeguards against people trying to
> manipulate their system, but that's just another "arms race"
> situation. I'm sure that, for example, if 30 of us got together
> and agreed to help each other out by doing a single search a day
> (each time for a different conspirator), drilling down and
> clicking on their URL, we could raise our site's ratings.
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I think the issue to keep in mind is normalcy. It wouldn't
be normal for a site to suddenly spring up in one day. So I
wouldn't think this type of tactic would necessarily work.
But Robert does have an excellent point in that Direct Hit
really hasn't been tested by spammers heavily to my
knowledge, because it was an optional thing. Now it's
directly before webmasters as an issue, and they are likely
to be more aggressive in trying to manipulate it. It will be
a real test to see if Direct Hit's spamming detection really
will cope.

The pitch also made mention of the Yahoo Business Express
submission service, as if this was further proof of the need
to buy popularity insurance. That service has nothing to do
with ranking at all. It simply gets your site reviewed more
quickly -- it doesn't even guarantee you'll be actually
listed. Having "satellite" sites would do nothing in
relation to this Yahoo service.

I know everyone has questions about all this stuff --
there's a lot happening with what I call "non-traditional"
ranking mechanisms. And not to follow one pitch with
another, but I just wrote a series of articles on all the
issues mentioned above for the current Search Engine Report.
Specifically, these will be of interest:

Yahoo Opens Express Submission Service
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9903-yahoo.html

HotBot Integrates Popularity Into Top Results
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9903-yahoo.html

Getting Away From Words-On-The-Page Relevancy
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9903-relevancy.html

This will also be of interest:

Counting Clicks and Looking at Links
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/9808-clicks.html

If you are worried about this type of stuff, sign up for the
monthly newsletter I publish. It's designed specifically to
help educate people about these type of changes. It's free,
and you can do it at:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/

And if you are really worried, become a Search Engine Watch
site subscriber. You pay a small annual fee, which gives you
more in-depth coverage on topics of interest to webmasters,
along with other benefits. More info is here:

http://searchenginewatch.com/about/subscribe.html

cheers,
danny
-----------------------------------
Danny Sullivan
Editor, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com


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Received on Fri Mar 12 1999 - 20:50:56 CST