stcrim - 11:25 pm on Jun 18, 2000 (gmt 0)

Jilly,

Don't give up just yet! Cindy and I are from the old school of search engine promo - and what we have done has worked very well. I don't know anything about themes and may never. If a theme is (don't clutter your site with but one subject) then I agree completely. But if it's about fluffy "so called" content littered pages that strive to fool spiders into thinking they're of some value, I don't agree. Sometimes those pages are built well and so they work well.

A simple search of Inktomi for lingerie (yahoo) - from here: [inktomi.com...] Reveals that most of the top listings are cloaked pages for [shop1208.inet-lingerie.com...]

You can rest assured the real pages are all keyword stuffed with lots of alt tags and comment tags, becuase that's what still works in all the Inktomi products and in AltaVista (though you can't submit them to AV anymore - they have to be either older already indexed pages or the spider has to find them own it's own).

At one point we started to investigate the themes thing and we're planning big changes but we woke up and realized we had over 600 pages ranking in the top ten for extremely competitive keywords and such a change would be the kiss of death.

Your competitor would not be cloaking if they were using a theme based site - there would be no reason to.

Cindy and I will be more than happy to share with you what we do and how we do it - "please e-mail us". (Call me strange but I would guess that the search engines get their best ideas from good forums like Brett's.)

About the link popularity thing. We have three sites that are all opt for the same keywords (leading to different locations) one has a lot of good incoming links thanks to Buddy Links, the other two don't have any and they are always grouped together in the search engines. The links may provide lots of spider trails back to your site but I can't see with our sites where the linked vs. not linked have ranked any different.

Brett's idea of inner linking is great... (a page on your site what has no links coming to it from your site may be viewed by SE's as spam or low value)

E-mail us!!! (and, no we're not trying to get your business, I promise. We're swamped now)

Steve
stcrim@prodigy.net