Posted on 02/26/2003 10:33:37 AM PST by TroutStalker
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:48:18 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Joy Holman sells provocative leather clothing on the Web. She wants what nearly everyone doing business online wants: more exposure on Google.
So from the time she launched exoticleatherwear.com last May, she tried all sorts of tricks to get her site to show up among the first listings when a user of Google Inc.'s popular search engine typed in "women's leatherwear" or "leather apparel." She buried hidden words in her Web pages intended to fool Google's computers. She signed up with a service that promised to have hundreds of sites link to her online store -- thereby boosting a crucial measure in Google's system of ranking sites.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The skank ho in the article should have read Google's rules, which specifically prohibit hidden text, etc, and caution that those link-swapping deals don't really help. Serves her right that she's delisted.
Mine (voicex.com) comes up fairly high on "Avaya Partner ACS" and other Avaya phone-system-related keyword searches, but I've also had to resort to pay-per-click ads on them to get listed at the top.
And I noticed the same thing the gal in the article did - back in November, my inbound phone traffic and email requests for quotes took an 80% nosedive. And I DON'T use any trickery. Now, one of my product lines comes up #1 without ANY ads, but that product line is "niche" and is only 5% of my business. The real bread and butter is the ACS, and the field is VERY crowded these days. I'm lucky to have a lot of repeat customers because the new stuff that used to come off the engines is just not there at the moment.
Michael
I hadn't noticed that it WAS. But I DO take issue with the idea that number of links = relevancy to search terms. That sounds like something People Magazine would come up with.
Michael
Of course you have to pay. If you want to appear in the top listings you either have to 1) actually have the most popular site, or 2) pay for the privilege. 70$ a month is cheap for advertising.
The internet marketplace is growing up, the people who still think that it is some wonderland where the rules of every other marketplace don't apply need to grow up with it. It used to be that you could register domain names for free, until the volume of registrations overwhelmed the system. People grumbled about having to pay for something that previously had been free, but it was no longer feasible to run it that way when domain name speculation and parking was rampant. The same thing is happening again in the search engine business.
TANSTAAFL.
And the Trout sure as hell know it too, even without Google. ;-)
It's not cheap if you don't get any replies. I don't know anyone who clicks through on the paid placements (ads) - being the most popular site is the only way to go.
That being said, how does one become the 'most popular site'? Here's a hint: the FR forums have a reputation for being addictive. It's a combination of breakings news and commentary.
When I launched two commercial sites last year, objective #1 was to get to the top of Google's rankings. The chief tactic was to emulate FR, F**ckedCompany, SlashDot, et al for their particular niches.
Both the mission and techniques have been accomplished. The two sites avg between 100-150k page views (not hits, otherwise the number would be 2x) per month. Sales-through at one of the sites has been pretty good (downloadable practice guidelines).
If fact, I've so saturated the market for anything to do with accounting regulation, oversight, etc. that the other day I was searching for something only tangentially similar and the first few hits where my own sites.
In case you're curious, the two sites are Sarbanes-Oxley and PCAOB-Online.
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