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August 16th, 2001 San Francisco, CA. The Search Engine Strategies 2001 seminar sponsored by Alta Vista™, hosted by Internet.com and presented by Search Engine Watch met with great success here Thursday & Friday at the elegant Fairmont Hotel, held to promote an understanding between the search engines/directories and webmasters.

Help us create an Internet with quality, relevant results "...by providing great content that is accurately represented in your submissions".*1 If you do that, we will do all that we can to help you obtain those vitally important top rankings for your websites.

For those of you who do not understand Internet Search Engines or Directories, here is a quick explanation. There are 100's of Search Engines (S.E.'s) and Directories operating on the Internet today. Think of them as 100's of different "brands" of giant phone books, all competing for you to use them instead the others. One of the ways they do that is by providing relevant, accurate results to their users within their index.

For example, when you search for "cats" you want to find "cats", not Bob's porno site. Lately, Directories such as DMOZ® (The Open Directory Project), About.com®, Looksmart® and Yahoo® have been favored as they use human editors to personally review the websites submitted, not computers using sophisticated algorithms, to hopefully provide more accurate results.

Kate Wingerson, V.P. & Editor in Chief of the LookSmart® directory took flack from the audience for their recent increase in the pay for submission program. LookSmart® recently increased the price of their basic submission cost from $99 to $149, an increase of 50%. The Express Submission fee also rose 50% to $299 from $199. She defended the Companies rates by pointing out the incredible value received by being included in LookSmart® and their partners search indexes. LookSmart® and their partners which include MSN®, Inktomi®, Excite®, Alta Vista®, iWON®, CNN® and others reach an estimated 77% of U.S. Internet users.*2a Kate also spoke of the new "Express Modify" service, allowing webmasters to make changes to a description or add a Category ($199 each).*2b

Bob Keating, Editor-in-Chief of DMOZ, or The Open Directory Project® (O.D.P.) uses 39,000 volunteer editors to maintain the results of their free Directory. An indexing in the O.D.P. is important for webmasters, as the results are considered relevant because a volunteer editor who is knowledgeable in their chosen Category does the indexing. These results are shared with 189 other S.E.'s or directories including AOL Search®, Lycos® & Netscape®.*3

Stefanie Blair, Lead Surfer@Yahoo® spent time stressing the importance of choosing the right category. She said, "You want to be at the top of the umbrella". The example she used was The Gap®, clothing retailers whose category drills down to Apparel and no further. She said, "Granted they may sell runners, sweaters and pants, too, they belong in this category only". Yahoo® currently asks $199 for a Business Express submission, which guarantees a review of the site by one of their 200 editors within 7 days, but does not guarantee it will be accepted.*4

Marshall Simmonds, Director of Search for About.com®, the human Internet said their "...guides, or editors, are always looking for new websites to add to their categories". Webmasters drill up to the appropriate guide and suggest their website be included in the free Directory.*5

One of the major Search Engine announcements was from Daniel Dulitz, Software Engineer from Google® who told of how they were now able to provide "image searching", for Multimedia files & video streaming. Google® also announced they were capable of performing "P.D.F. searches", allowing users to search the Google® database for websites using Adobe's® Portable Document Format files.*6

Chris Kermoian, director of Internet search services at Alta Vista™ spoke of their "trusted feed" program, allowing webmasters with large numbers of pages to obtain a close working relationship with A.V. The program is ideally suited to those who wish to submit traditionally hard to index pages such as framed pages or dynamic content and provides weekly refreshes.*7

FAST/All the Web's Dr. Rob Rubin, Executive V.P., announced their "FASTPartnerSite”" program, similar to the "trusted feed" and "index connect" programs of their competitors, which provides regular site indexing and guaranteed inclusion in their index.*8

Tim Mayer, Web Search Product Manager from Inktomi® Corp. announced a similar program, entitled "Index Connect". Other news from Inktomi® was their new "spam crusader program" aimed at stopping webmasters attempting to cheat the system by submitting multiple URL's. Tim also stated that the "new.net names will not be supported at this time".*9

The stakes are high, "...with approximately 1.8 billion web pages out there and well over 80 million searches every day on Inktomi®'s partners; websites that can rise to the top of the stack will be very successful. If you are not in the top ten results, you are not going to be found easily, and it will not matter how beautiful your site is.*10

Some of the new terminologies discussed at this seminar were "black magic", "white magic" and "green magic". "Black Magic" refers to some of the dirty tricks used by webmasters to fool S.E.'s into providing results that have nothing to do with what their searchers are looking for, polluting the Internet. These include writing titles, keywords & descriptions that are irrelevant with the real page. Others create doorway, ghost or cloaked pages that show one page to the S.E. robot, and a different, very irrelevant page to the searcher.*11

Some webmasters even attempt to use hidden text to cover their pages with keywords in the same color fonts as the backgrounds, so the searcher doesn't see them on the page, but the S.E. robot that spiders the site does. Most of these tricks have long since been discovered by the S.E.'s, whose response has been to quickly ban any sites that do this and remove them from their index forever.

"White Magic" refers to webmasters who play within the S.E. submission rules, optimizing their customer's websites that make them search engine friendly. Adding truthful titles, headings, descriptions, keywords, etc. so the search engine receives an accurate synopsis of what the website is about and can pass those relevant search results on to the individual searchers.

"Green Magic" refers to the pay per click or pay for inclusion S.E.'s that require payment from the Webmaster for top rankings. Website owners pay for every visitor that clicks on the listing/advertisement on GoTo.com, it's $5.06 a CLICK for a #1 position on a highly searched keyword, such as "casino".*12

The search engines have, needless to say, been actively trying to combat abuse of their indexes by webmasters who spam (send 100's or 1,000's of requests to add their website pages or URL's) or use "black magic" tricks to make their web pages appear on top, when in actuality they have no relevance to their customer's search.

Alta Vista™ recently changed their submission page to one that requires a human to enter a code that automatic submission software cannot read. According to Chris Kermoian of AltaVista™, "We were literally receiving up to 100,000 requests a day before the change, 90% of which were spam. We saw an immediate and large decrease in the amounts of spam inclusions we were receiving." *13

Google® has gone a different way in their approach to stopping abuse of their index by spammers and condoners of "black magic". They use an algorithm that relies heavily on "link popularity", meaning other websites that put a link from their website to yours must be reasonably good, the theory being that if a webmaster thought enough of your site to add a link from his to yours, it's most likely a good site.

Webmasters once again tried to "trick" the S.E.'s by creating "link farms", sites that have no serious content & whose sole purpose is to fool the S.E. into believing someone's site is popular by adding 100's of links. S.E.'s now look more at the quality of the link and anchor text surrounding it, than the quantity. Daniel Dulitz of Google® used the analogy of "If the NHL website has links back to your hockey store, that's obviously a much better link than one from an unknown XYZ company or link farm which will be essentially ignored." *14

Overall, the Search Engine Strategies 2001 seminar, moderated by search engine expert Danny Sullivan, of www.searchenginewatch.com, revealed a seemingly new attitude of cooperation between the Search Engines/Directories and those of us designing and promoting websites. Many good tips as to how to create search engine/directory friendly sites were to be found here & a surprisingly approachable group of top level managers, too.

We all need to work together to maintain the integrity of the Internet and to help each other provide the surfers with the relevant results they are looking for when performing a search. If you are a Webmaster, or Search Engine that did not attend, it is highly recommend you attend the next one in Boston, March 4-5, 2002. Additional information can be found at www.searchenginestrategies.com.

Steve Murrell is the director of Virtual Photos and Maps, Ltd., developer of many websites including www.maps-of-mexico.com featuring 100's of Mexico maps, weather and 42 virtual city tours with 450+ panoramic, 360º photographs. He has been involved in S.E. optimization for a number of years and obtained many top 10 rankings for his websites. He can be contacted for further information anytime at steve@maps-of-mexico.com. Feel free to use and edit this story as necessary or you can link back to the story on our website at:
www.maps-of-mexico.com/search-engines-plea-content-not-black-magic.html

Virtual Photos and Maps, Ltd.

4170 - 148th Ave., N.E.

Redmond, WA

98052

Telephone: 1-888-881-7375

Facsimile: 1-425-795-7227

Website: www.maps-of-mexico.com

E-mail: info@maps-of-mexico.com

References:

All quotes were taken from the featured speakers at the Search Engine Strategies 2001 Seminar at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, CA. Aug. 16th and 17th, 2001. Audiotapes of the speaker's comments are available from www.PlaybackNow.com or www.searchenginestrategies.com.

*1. Meet the Search Engines forum, Daniel Dulitz, Google® August 16th, 2001

*2. Dealing with the Directories forum, August 16th, 2001 & Jupiter Media Metrix: http://www.iredge.com/iredge/iredge.asp?c=002736&f=2005&fn=071901_Jupiter__159.htm

*3. Dealing with the Directories forum, August 16th, 2001 & http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/Sites_Using_ODP_Data/
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/alliances.htm

*4. Dealing with the Directories forum, August 16th, 2001

*5. Link Building forum, August 16th, 2001

*6. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*7. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*8. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*9. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*10. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*11. Page Design Solutions forum, Barbara Coll, webmama.com, Aug.16th, 2001

*12. GoTo.com, from "Get Current Bid", August 16th, 2001

*13. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001

*14. Meet the Search Engines forum, August 16th, 2001