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Vista,
The reason this site is ranked #1, even though the title and description doesn't even contain the words real estate isn't because they are using any kind of spam techniques. This is simply a bi-product of AV's theme indexing.
If you have supporting content on your site for a particular phrase, it is quite common for AV to return the home page as a match even if the phrase only shows up in a hyperlink. If the hyperlink takes you to additional content that makes extensive use of the phrase, AV will give you credit for it but it won't return the page that actually includes the terms.
We have a couple clients that are experiencing this 50%-70% of the time. As we develop and submit new optimized content, the number of home page matches increases. Even when the new phrase is only included in a hyperlink.
IMHO, this is one of the flaws of site matching vs. page matching. In the example you gave, I would have clicked on one of the other listings because the title and descriptions contained my search phrase. And all the AV data we have collected suggests that most searchers react the same way.
I would much rather have a lower rank with an accurate title and description than a #1 position with a general description.
Yes, they are placed number 1.
Yes, I have my site in top 10 as well.
No, I don't mind the competion and I love to learn and get better. That's why I am here. :)
I'll bet you $1000 that I will beat them. :)
That means: instead to go just for costa rica real estate perfectly optimized pages, better would be to also include 100 links to RELAVENT information on: costa rica real estate directory.
That would really have to score great (in case of AV anyway). Right?
And then cloak the succker! :)
Only thing I am trying to say: the quality and accuracy is important NOT the quantity.
Is there another way to keep Web Bandit and code ripper and such from accessing my source files?
Another thought, if an alliance of search engines was created to spider new submissions twice, once with the spider address as usual, and another with spidering capability from variable IP, wouldn't a large disparity in the ratings between these two allow filtering of Spider Cloak type technology used for spamming?
>wouldn't a large disparity in the ratings between these two allow filtering of Spider Cloak type technology used for spamming?
This is one the shortcomings of cloaking, generally an SE that wants to detect cloaking will simply field a spider from an "unknown IP" and compare results. We refer to them as shadow spiders. INK for one, was doing this and may be still, although I believe most SEs have concluded that cloaked pages represent only a tiny percentage of the spam problem they are constantly combatting and have focused their attention elsewhere.
Cloaking done right is a good deal of work, you'll spend considerable time watching your log files for these rogue spiders as well as maintaining a dozen cloaked pages for every one human viewable page that you cloak...
>Is there another way to keep Web Bandit and code ripper and such from accessing my source files?
I haven't given this a lot of thought but off the top of my head, if they provide a unique USER_AGENT string, you could ban by user agent in .htaccess.
>Is there another way to keep Web Bandit and code ripper
>and such from accessing my source files?
Yes, you can deny access by IP Address to any visitor including core rippers.
Some examples HERE [webmasterworld.com] if you are on a Apache web server.
>Another thought, if an alliance of search engines was created ...
Not only possible but already in place, although not an alliance really, just spiders from the same search engine using different IP addresses, multiple User Agents, retrieving the same page multiple times, and ignoring robots.txt at times. If your cloaking method does not handle these situations favourably then your pages will be flagged for further review, or an automatic penalty applied.
...ooops we posted at the same time Dave - a double answer - cool :)
Yes I am on Apache.
I AM new to search engines and spiders. I'm reading TCP/IP for dummies. I am sure I could phrase those questions I have a lot better when I'm clear on my terminology.
I want to learn the art of optimizing pages for a few of the more known spider bots. Where on the forum to go??
question: from Air's list, "Cloaking on non promotional domains tends to do better than straight promotional domains. Likely due to the boost from a real domain appearing in directory listings."
I'm not sure what this means.
Also, I would like to know if people are using cloaking to present non flash.swf data to Search Engines, while presenting flash.swf files to visitors? Is there any way an engine could highly rate a site which was primarily .swf content? If not, it's really important to overcome this inability of the engines. I think www.flashkit.com is a good example. It appears that they use a lot of .swf content and that this would make most of their site complete gibberish to an html text favoring engine.
Cloaking from your main site works better because overtime, you will build link popularity to url's that are delivering cloaked content to spiders. Along with getting a boost from directory listings, you also get the added benefit of greatly increasing the number/frequency of spider visits.
If you use a secondary or promotional domain to serve cloaked pages and then you rediret visitors to the "real" site, you will have a more difficult time getting ranked for competitive phrases because no one will ever link to the promotional domain.
Regarding flash, yes many sites use cloaking to deliver content to spiders. It really is the best way to deal with flash content. You can also incorporate some javascript that will allow you to check and see if the human visitors have flash installed. That way, you can give them the proper page without forcing them to click a link to get the page they can view.
