Everyone's seen the ole search for "Absolute Failure" and George Bush pops up. Well I've been designing sites for a long time now, polishing the meta tags up and all that but generally speaking I know jack and shit about how these pages get ranked. I've read a few books but its so cryptic. Anyone able to summarize? :)

Google ranks any given page based on how many other pages link to it, adjusted for their own ranks. Most modern search engines almost totally ignore meta-tags because of abuse or use them as a lowest order factor.

If you actually want to learn about it, you can find the original research papers published about the Yahoo and Google algorithms out there, although they are technically dense.

Basically for most purposes there are 3 main search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. Most of the smaller search engines IE: Metacrawler, Lycos etc... pull their results from one or all of the big 3's databases.

Googles main index is based on the DMOZ directory. Now here's the kicker with Google.

As Malse said Googles algorythms rank based on back links, meaning that the quality of a link to YOUR site, if you also link to them that will for all purposes negate that link to you. It is based on a, what is known in SEO circles as "poorly planned geeking" which essentially clouds the results in a Google search whereby you will get the pages that are mostly in place to run Google AdSense. Google views a backlink as a vote IE: the more votes the more important your site must be so the higher it will rank. in other words "poorly planned geeking" easily manipulated and defrauded.

The Page rank system comes from Larry Page, who designed created the algorythm, its not really a "page" rank as it is a Larry Page rank.

Where Malse is incorrect is on the meta tags, IE Title, Keyword and Description they hold a high relevancy but only if correctly written.

The best advice I can give is that search engines constantly change the way they index and its a game of educated guessing is all.

If you ever want to discuss off the board send me a pm and I'll give you my work number.

Correctly written meta tags? It's either valid HTML or it's not, there isn't a "correctness" value of the Meta "keyword" header. No one in their right mind consider those relevant unless they're validated by the page itself or its child links, which makes them almost totally redundant. That was the earliest example of search engine misdirection or "poorly planned geeking," though I've never heard that term before.

There are far more complicated and insidious search engine attacks now, such as large numbers of fake pages in a giant link web, in the constant battle for people with useless sites to try and claim ad revenue. Chances are any technique you come up with has already been tried by far more motivated people, and the best way of getting search engines to recommend your site is making it not suck.

Correctly written meta tags? It's either valid HTML or it's not, there isn't a "correctness" value of the Meta "keyword" header. No one in their right mind consider those relevant unless they're validated by the page itself or its child links, which makes them almost totally redundant. That was the earliest example of search engine misdirection or "poorly planned geeking," though I've never heard that term before.

There are far more complicated and insidious search engine attacks now, such as large numbers of fake pages in a giant link web, in the constant battle for people with useless sites to try and claim ad revenue. Chances are any technique you come up with has already been tried by far more motivated people, and the best way of getting search engines to recommend your site is making it not suck.

Thanks for the lesson in how search engines work. I never realized that I could gain more knowledge from one of your posts than I have in the 11 years since starting my company. I guess I need to shut my company down now and remove my listings from Yahoo, Google and MSN along with giving the money back to the 18 companies that have paid me for website design/SEO consulting on their websites this month and inform the other 450+ current clients that although they have excellent positioning in natural results and have collectively spent somewhere around $800.00 on CPC in the last year, that I've been doing this stuff wrong all along.

Malse, you're a smart guy so understanding this shouldn't be an issue. Your post is a very good example of "poorly planned geeking" perhaps you can figure out why with a little self reflection.


Kelraz heres some basic stats from Urchin that can give you an idea of traffic generation over the last week to my site using SEO:

2.search.yahoo.com/search (http://search.yahoo.com/search) 229 25.47% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();) 3.www.google.com/search (http://www.google.com/search) 78 8.68% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();) 4.search.msn.com/results.aspx (http://search.msn.com/results.aspx) 47 5.23% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();)

1.website+designers 92 20.77% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();) 2.flash+advertisement 40 9.03% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();) 3.website+design 16 3.61% http://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/hbar2.gifhttp://65.108.190.130:9999/uicons/default/tod.gif (javascript: uVoid();)

Most of the traffic under website designers comes from Yahoo and MSN with the bulk under flash advertisements coming from Google.

Congratulations on having a successful business. I'm not going to play e-penis games by throwing out unsupportable numbers about how meta name="keyword" hasn't been used as major factor by search engines since the late 90s, but if you'd like to stop stroking off long enough to illuminate us, please do. That'd be fascinating stuff.

Just as a fun experiment, I tried googling some statistics on meta keywords. I didn't want to read the pages, I wanted to see if any of the top 10 results had my search terms in their meta keyword list. Then I did the same thing on yahoo.

Most popular meta result?

http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"

Roughly half of the returned links had no keyword list at all. The remaining did not have my search terms. I repeated the same thing with a few known pages that had simple and relevant meta-keyword sets. Searching for fairly common, everyday words like "club soda" and "washing machine" I knew were in their keyword tag never brought them up, instead I would get specific links to more precisely relevant sites many of which had no meta tags at all.

There are techniques to making your site show up more on search engines, but most of them have to do with making it clean HTML with descriptive text instead of images -- the sort of advice I was addressing to Kelraz. I'm sure someone with your experience could tell us a lot more, which would be far more enlightening than hearing about your 4Q earnings. I don't make websites for a living, but like many people I've worked on a few commercial ones over the years, and would be glad to hear about your actual experiences when you rewind that defensiveness a little.

The top result in Google for washing machines has these as its keywords:


<meta name="keywords" content="washing machines, washers, washing machine reviews, best washing machines, front load washer reviews, best front load washer, top loader washing machine reviews, consumer search reports">

Poorly written meta tags, but remembering its a Google result and Google is all about backlinks over content and meta tags.

They also run Google AdSense which is another story.

Thanks for your heartfelt concern Malse. I would be happy to consult with you about search engine marketing for your company, let me know and we can get things going, you'll find the fees pretty reasonable and should realize a decent ROI.

It' funny, I just last night completed some META TAG work for one of my wife's coworkers.

I too am in the mindset that description and keyword meta tags do make a difference for the spider bots, though not to a huge extent. Meta tags must be written 'correctly' for a spider bot to interact with the index page seamlessly.

For example, most spider bots will out right IGNORE index pages where there are more than 34 keywords in the keyword meta tag. You should not have more than 20 keywords for your index page to work well with a spider bot. If a spider bot finds more than 34 keywords in the first page it hits on your site (usually index) it will ignore the rest of your website.

Your description meta tag should be short, clear and concise and should eveb reflect words in the domain name to be relevant.

Other than KEYWORD and DESCRIPTION you should not use any other META tags as they are generally ignored by the spider bots. The other meta tags simply serve as comment fluff. You should only use meta tags on your start page or index page. Using meta tags on all your web pages is over blow and will not serve to increase your search rankings, hell I bet spiders may even ignore your website if you riddle the entire thing with meta tags.

So, in essence well formed meta tags do make a difference when the spider bots are interacting with them. How meta keywords relate to the indexing algorithm of any search site is a mystery to me, they change the algorithm so much that I am sure it would not make much of a difference on which keywords you use.

Try this website, the meta tag analyzer is a very interesting tool:

http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html

Anyway, imho, the meta tag is like the RNG in EQ. She is a bitch godess that can make or break your session ;).

Cheers,