RE: Coastal Sites

From: Dylan Hunter <Dylan.Hunter_at_fast.no>
Date: Wed 22 Sep 1999 08:44:53 -0400

HAVAH HOPE WROTE:
>Has anyone heard of Coastal Sites in N.C. They claim they
>can get the major search engines except Yahoo to change the
>ranking of a site on the results page when a key word search
>is done...
>
>I am very suspicious. As far as the search engines tell
>you, except for paid responses ranking is done by META tags,
>ALT tags and the first few lines of text. Is there another
>way to improve a site's ranking?
>
>I would be interested in talking with anyone who has had
>dealings with this company.

I have not had dealings with this particular company, but
largely what you're suggesting is correct. Most search
engines use some permutation of Location/Frequency/Stress
logic to determine relevance. The closer a search term is
to the top of the document, (including the page title) the
more often the search term occurs, and the more stresses,
(i.e. bolds or italics) that occur, the more relevant the
site is determined to be.

Be careful - there is some potential consulting value if
what they're doing is helping you refine your text, etc. to
better clarify your real degree of relevance. However, some
people attempt to use this knowledge of how search engines
work to put in a series of invisible text, other
manipulations to meta-data, etc., (as a moral person, you'll
know the difference - it's not hard).

Since there are people out there attempting to manipulate
search engines, many of them have set up a series of
algorithms to detect some of this manipulation, and
significantly de-prioritize the offending site, or exclude
the offending material within your page, and assess the
relevance excluding it, (thus negating whatever work you had
the company do).

For instance, if you were trying to establish relevance to
say, the term "road runner," one of the simple algorithms
might scan for the incidence of "road runner," (a moderately
obscure phrase) in relation to the total number of words on
the page, and if this ratio exceeds some level, (say 20% of
the total word count) either "road runner" is blocked from
consideration, the number of incidences is scored less, etc.

Ask the company to give you some before-and-after examples
of past clients. If what they're doing seems to be in the
spirit of the first group of companies that I mentioned,
think about it. If they're in the second group, you have to
think carefully if a) that's the kind of company that you
want to do business with, and b) will their work actually
provide the results mentioned, or will search engine filters
effectively penalize you for attempting to manipulate them.

Good Luck!

Dylan




Received on Wed Sep 22 1999 - 07:44:53 CDT