Ugly text block of keywords -- does it help?

[Bekariso]

Lately I have been noticing sites (not on this server!) which, down at the bottom of each page, place a huge block of small text (like font size="-2") repeating their keywords over and over dozens of times. Usually they put it almost the same colour as the background or wallpaper, though I figure for every one who can't quite make it match, there are a few who do this "invisibly" (although there would probably still be a big blank space at the bottom of their pages).

I think it looks really ugly and messy and unprofessional, not to mention not very "fair," but I was wondering if such a method would actually do anything for the search engine ratings of those who mess up their pages like this. I sure don't want to do this on any of my pages, but I was wondering if it was actually accomplishing something for those who do it. After all, isn't a pointlessly ugly site worse than a site that's ugly for a reason? Hmm . . .

Just wondering,

Bekariso



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Bekariso
susogi.net/Bekariso (http://susogi.net/Bekariso)
*** We prefer to remain anomalous ***

[Deb]

It used to help them but the search engines are quite wise to that method of spam these days.

It's a quick way to have yourself banned from the engine. If I see a site like that and I'm in the mood to worry about it, I'll head over to altavista.digital.com and submit the site :P

Of course I am also the type that will re-submit links I found in altavista.digital.com that are missing... I enjoy knowing that I'm keeping the Internet clean http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif

Deb

[Justin]

The reason that people don't make the colors match is that most search engines will not accept them if it's the same color as the bgcolor. However, if they use an image for the background, they can match exactly as long as the bgcolor specified is different.

I agree that it's wrong. Most search engines will not even take commented lines into consideration, and most will also disallow text if it's "invisible". Some even disallow it if it's smaller than a certain size.

I just figure, make a good site, use the normal <META> tags, and you'll get hits. My site is extremely simple - very little graphics, no java (hate it), a little CSS and javascript, that's it. Oh, yeah, and lots of real content (yeah, right).

Deb - I didn't know anyone cared about the net being clean - I thought it was like the ozone layer, or New York. Smokey the Bear would be proud.

Justin
--Only you can prevent forest fires and dead links--

[Justin]

Oh, by the way, you can now just type altavista.com to get there. Found this by accident. They must have bought the domain.

Justin, member of PETH (People for the Ethical Treatment of Hyperlinks)

[Bekariso]

Hehehe thanks for the laughs, Justin!

Now see, I thought it had always been altavista.com, so I figured the address Deb gave was some fancy secret back door! Actually they have alta-vista.com, too, I noticed.

And altavistacanada.com is my favourite search engine for stuff in my country. Though my biggest search engine pet peeve is people who submit to altavistacanada (which is included in almost any search engine submission script that does more than 30 sites), AND who say their site is Canadian, or for a business based in Canada, when it's not, just so they rank higher and get more hits even when I specify a "Canadian sites only" search! ARGH!

*deep breath* Ahem. I'll get over it.

:P




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Bekariso
susogi.net/Bekariso (http://susogi.net/Bekariso)
*** We prefer to remain anomalous ***

[meikel]

Oh, by the way, you can now just type altavista.com to get there. Found this by accident. They must have bought the domain.
They bought it for a very nice sum of $3.35 million (maybe even more).
Read the details at
http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/all/9808123alta

Before that the domain was
http://www.altavista.digital.com

Greetings from someone who wishes to have bought altavista.com four years ago
[nbsp][nbsp]Meikel Weber
http://www.meikel.com

[Justin]

Geez! And I thought it was bad that they wanted $2500 for vdj.com!

Justin
http://www.vdj.net

[Justin]

Haha. I just submitted a dead link to altavista.com. Every time I went there to search for Virtual DJ this one site keeps coming up, and there's like 20 different pages, and they're all dead links. These dead links were putting me on the third page, so hopefully they'll remove the wole site within a couple of days. I just put in the domain itself, which is totally dead.

A little housekeeping is ok when there's stuff in MY way!

Geez, my program's so good it killed the other Virtual DJ's!!! And I just buried them, too http://www.aota.net/ubb/smile.gif



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Justin Nelson, SFE Inc.
http://www.vdj.net