"Jay Honeck" writes:

Go to Yahoo and type in "Iowa City Airport".

The first choice that comes up is "Eastern Iowa Airport" -- the Cedar
Rapids, IA airport!

How do they *do* that? It doesn't appear to be a paid advertisement, since
it appears along with the rest of the search results.

This kind of stuff drives me crazy, since it seems to be a deliberate -- and
annoyingly successful -- attempt to "spoof" the search engine. Why doesn't
the Iowa City Airport come up first?

Yeah, it's annoying when funny things come up first. Why, on Google,
the first link I get searching for "Iowa City Airport" is from some
darned *motel*! :-)

Went back and tried the Yahoo search, and I can't see any signs of
"spoofing". I think the problem really is that Yahoo isn't paying
enough attention to the location of the words relative to each other
on the page -- noting that the sequence "Iowa City" doesn't appear in
the source for that page *at all*! I can't see any legit reason for
it to rank so high for that query. I haven't been following Yahoo
search engine carefully, but I think all the majors (Google, Yahoo,
and MSN are what I mean by that at the moment) carefully separate
advertising hits from real hits; I don't think there's any way to "pay
for placement" of real search results on any of the major ones.

Most of the claims about "search engine optimization" magic are
untrue. There aren't ways to do many of the things unscrupulous
practitioners claim to be able to do -- and getting caught trying can
sometimes get you permanently downrated on Google, which is a pretty
severe punishment. And the search engines are understandably somewhat
tight-fisted with information about how their systems work. And they
change little details pretty often.
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