Icebound writes:

Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, "Jay Honeck" said:

When I type in "Iowa City Airport" at the Yahoo search screen, our "History
of the Iowa City Airport" webpage pops up second on the list -- which is all
well and fine.

Google uses a secret "Page Rank" technology that is mostly based on
how
many sites link to yours. If people like your site enough to link to it a
lot, Google will rank it higher. Unfortunately there are people out there
who cheat, or "game the system" if you want to be charitable about it.
What they do is put up thousands of web pages that consist of nothing but
links to their customers, in order to improve their customers "Page Rank".
Google is in a constant battle to find the cheaters and eliminate the
artificial boost they give to their customer's Page Rank, though, so
paying these people is ****ing your money away. Far better would be to
get your friends on this newsgroup to put a link to your site on their
personal pages or blogs.

And they'll sometimes retalliate pretty massively if they really get
peeved -- like block all listing of a site. It's best *not* to try
for quick-fix rules-lawyer solutions to this problem.

about
Google is probably true of Yahoo. But since Google is the only search
engine that matters, I wouldn't worry about Yahoo if they're not using
Google.

It must be a pretty exotic algorithm.

In google, when you try "Suites start at" (phrase from the home page),
plus "Alexis", you get 2 hits to a hotel in Seattle, but nothing else.

That's a bizarre result (which I reproduced; it really does happen).
I'm afraid Jay may be getting bitten by Frontpage; the way that
"suites start" banner is put in may not be a way google parses and
understands (although I find alt text on an image saying that, and
google *is* supposed to pick that up).

Does that mean that if nobody links to you, you may never even show up
in an search-list??

No. I've gotten lots of pages listed that aren't linked to. But they
don't rank as high as pages on similar topics that *are* linked to.
It's also somewhat at the site level, rather than the page level,
sort-of. I mean, it's secret, so we're all kinda guessing, based on
what we've seen over the years. And it may have changed a few times,
just to confuse things.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
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