Web Position Gold???

[Shalazar]

Has anybody had any experience with this product?

It's just so difficult to get meta tags correct for all the various search engines.[nbsp][nbsp]And what's worse, one good set of tags isn't even consistent within a given engine.[nbsp][nbsp]For example, I used to be #1 listing for Charisma Carpenter on Excite, check back the next day and I'm 10 pages deep...a week later, back to #1, now gone again.

I'm fighting a losing battle against a competing site who is ranking #1 across several search portals, and isn't even up and running anymore.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[sheila]

I would recommend you ask these questions at the Search Engine Forums:
http://searchengineforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi

[elite]

Not sure about that program, but I think its easy to get yoursef into the spamming pool with those programs.

My advice is spend half the time you do trying to get in the search engines on visiting related sites and doing a link swap.

-Brian

[Dan Kaplan]

This won't be the most popular advice, but what the heck.[nbsp][nbsp]I was a "regular" (mostly in the lurking sense) at Search Engine Forums for a while.[nbsp][nbsp]It eventually became pretty clear to me that you could make analyzing the search engines a full-time job, or you could spend a day or two on it initially and hardly ever worry about it again, and your results will be very similar.

The reason I say this is that SE algorithms change so regularly, and the "experts" in the field are constantly changing their mind as to what exactly is the best approach, that most everything averages out in the end.[nbsp][nbsp]Of course, this depends on you doing things right in the first place.

Furthermore, much of the advice seems to be just plain wrong.[nbsp][nbsp]My non-doorway page site does best in the rankings with SE's that supposedly favor doorways...

Why drive yourself crazy worrying about it?[nbsp][nbsp]:)

Doorway

[Shalazar]

It's not that important really, afterall here are my major rankings:

Yahoo 1
Webcrawler 29
Hotbot 13
Infoseek 19
Lycos 3
NorthernLight Top 10

It's just really frustrating when you're trying to set yourself apart from the pact as the definitive online resource for something, and you go to search engines and find out inactive pages or pages with absolutely no defining meta tags at all rank above yours.

And that advice is very rational indeed Dan.[nbsp][nbsp]If you build it, they will come...and if you're good at it, you can be independent of the search engines.

[Justin]

I think that having quality content that is unique from your competitors will be the most helpful... The way I see it, you can gimmick users to your site all day long - but will they return or bookmark the site if there is nothing there they want to see? Probably not...

My advice would be to spend more time working on your site and it's content, and just do the standard site submissions and keep your meta tags up to date etc. I haven't seen your site or anything, this is just general advice - but if you want your site to be a "definative source", make it so, and they will come :)

Hope this helps someone...

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[Dan Kaplan]

I agree with Justin entirely.[nbsp][nbsp]I don't understand the spammers/keyword stuffers.[nbsp][nbsp]Actually, I think I mentioned a similar thing about email spam in another thread -- is it really that effective?[nbsp][nbsp]As Justin pointed out, keeping visitors is much more important than getting that one extra first-time page view.
It's just really frustrating when you go to search engines and find out inactive pages or pages with absolutely no defining meta tags at all rank above yours. All the more reason why I don't spend too much time worrying about it.[nbsp][nbsp];)[nbsp][nbsp] The exceptions often seem more frequent than the rules when it comes to SE's.[nbsp][nbsp]I imagine that over time, users will get more savvy to the SE inconsistencies and not place quite as much trust into their results.[nbsp][nbsp]That's why I almost exclusively use indexes (i.e. Yahoo) instead of SE's...

By the way, your rankings for the six you listed look pretty solid.[nbsp][nbsp]I doubt you could improve on that too much without major fiddling, and even then, you'd probably just slip in another ranking.[nbsp][nbsp]:(

Dan

[Melprophet]

I've shared in this frustration Shalazar, and ended up doing exactly what Justin and Dan said here. Along the way I spent a little bit of time tinkering with meta tags and keywords and did manage to get decent positions again after having them, losing them and going nuts trying to regain them.

But what I found, is that there only seem to be 3 or 4 search engines and 1 or 2 directories that really matter and yield a significant number of referrals.

I'm 1st page on many of the engines you mentioned, but nearly all my referrals come from Excite, Web Crawler and now that it seems to be working again, Alta Vista. The other search engines combined don't yield the results I get from either my page one listing on Excite alone, or even the page 2 postion I have on Alta Vista. Yahoo and Dmoz yield good results too, but none of the other directories seem to be worth much.

I've heard that a lot of people find this to the case, and I figured I'd toss this out there and add my $.02

Mel

[Justin]

The major engines will drive the most traffic to your site, but the smaller ones help out a lot just due to the shear bulk of them that are out there... It's not worth hunting each one down, but whenever you run accross a small search engine/directory, it only usually takes a couple of seconds to submit (and I recommend using a Hotmail account for these...)

The biggest thing that helps is how long the site has been around - as more people link to your site, more small engines and crawlers will pick up on it. The bigger engines also seem to rank sites that have been updated less frequently higher - mostly in an attempt to keep links that are less likely to go stale...

Then there are those little pages you create just for search engines :)[nbsp][nbsp]http://www.hostfacts.com/hosts/SE/ is one - it looks like a static HTML page full of links to other static HTML pages... Thanks to some tricky programming, the PHP page that controls the host listings knows when it has been called as a ".html" page, and when it is, it sends out fake headers with a really old last modified date and so on - making it look like an old html page that probably won't be going anywhere. In reality the content is pulled from MySQL via PHP... the links page itself is also dynamically generated, so it's always up to date, but again, the headers tell a different story :P

But I whipped that up in one day a long time ago, and it has popped up in AV quite a lot - once they spider that, since my entire site uses a random keyword script for the meta tags, each page will be ranked differently - so some will, by chance, be more optimized for this or that engine - thus a good portion of the indexed pages will be accepted by each engine :)

So you see, I spent about a week all together trying to make my site as indexable as possible, using every trick I could think of, then I simply submitted that one page (using 6 URL's - hostfacts.com/net/org, with and w/o the 'www') to the major engines and left my sig in message boards all over the place, and now months later I'm still getting quite a bit of traffic from various search engines and directories. But I spent months on the content - which is the most important for keeping visitors (though I am way overdue for an update...)

Enough of my rambling now :P

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support
[This message has been edited by Justin (edited 01-24-00@4:46 pm)]

[Dan Kaplan]

Justin, I'm impressed by your level of trickiness![nbsp][nbsp]:)

At the risk of over-simplification, I would go a step further and say you could alomst get by just by getting a decent listing in one of the Inktomi engines.[nbsp][nbsp]I don't know who all's using Inktomi at the moment, but HotBot/Yahoo would be a notable example.[nbsp][nbsp]It seems that there are so many smaller engines scouring/spidering each other's listings that it doesn't take long for one listing to mushroom into dozens or hundreds of near identical listings.

Sometimes a dmoz editor gets canned for bad behavior and a new, friendlier editor comes along and favorably embellishes your listing... ;)

Dmoz

[Mandi]

*DUH* It never occurred to me to submit my redirected tld's!!![nbsp][nbsp](And it REALLY never would have occurred to me to do the w/ & w/o www)[nbsp][nbsp]Thanks :)!

I have a very focused website and find that I hit my target group pretty well, more by offline word of mouth and publicity than anything, but the search engine thing never hurts of course.[nbsp][nbsp]One thing I never considered when creating the site, which is called cgspouses (for Coast Guard Spouses) is that most folks search on Coast Guard, not CG . . . oh, well, I am pretty happy with my traffic for now!

[Dan Kaplan]

Question about submitting the redirected tld's:[nbsp][nbsp]unless you do something like Justin to randomize meta tags and everything, aren't many of the SE's capable of detecting duplicate content (i.e. mirrored sites) and not accepting or penalizing for it?

Dupe-licate