[fight_truth_decay]

Never use Google--am probably one of the few.

[Texas_Jarhead]

I sure wish Google wasn't anti-Christian

[Puddleglum]

ping to myself to read later

[Flyer]

A Google search for "Houston FreeRepublic" turns up our Chapter web site first. I gave up trying to beat the search engines long ago. If the web site is a business - advertise!

[Dan Cooper]

That's what Ms. Holman has done to keep up visibility for her Web site. Now she pays as much as $70 a month to appear in Google's paid listings. "You have no other alternative but to pay," she says. "I'm really frustrated that I don't have any other recourse. I've got to be in there somehow."

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.

[Slyfox]

I just punched my screen name into Google and my profile page came up ranking #7. Front page and I don't even advertize.

[Slyfox]

TroutStalker, you are #1 on Google.

[Elle Bee]

have you ever tried Web Ferret?

I've used it for years and it has served quite well

.

[dead]

Cool. I just googled on my book title, and it came up first!

Citizen Clinton

It came up ninth when I entered my (fairly common) real name.

[RightOnline]

I only know of one company, one technology that can truly help with search rankings (although not their real focus; but they're damned good at it) using technology, not spamming, packing metadata, etc., etc.......all the garbage used by these other scamsters (and if you use them, you run the chance of being de-listed anyway by various search engines), and that is SearchEdge (www.searchedge.com).

[glorgau]

I actually got a site to show up as the first link in yahoo and google doing nothing more than a few simple meta tags and maintaining the site. Granted the searches that it comes up for are pretty obscure...