Re: Custom pages for robots!

The note below is correct, and would be the proper way to do things...if
this system weren't abused.

Unfortunately, too many people still think in traditional terms, where the
audience is an "enemy" to be "captured".  So, they will present the robots
with anything necessary to draw traffic,even if the information is
misleading.  So the search engines respond by barring the sites that use it,
simple because of the abuse.  Typing in :Astronomy" and getting a sex site
is not usually the result of poor indexing on the search engine...it's the
result of deliberate mis-representation on the part of the site.  How this
is supposed to convince intelligent people to shop at that site is a mystery
to all but highly training, highly paid "marketing experts".

Personally, as a programmer, I feel that cloaking is a much neater solution
than huge lists of doorways.  Since I can't stop either system from being
abused, I guess I will just have to go with the flow...which is generally
controlled by the search engines.

Darrell

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----- Original Message -----

> I do know of least one product that does this. Mine. We've spent over a
year
> refining this technology. I believe that the folks at AltaVista, Yahoo,
> HotBot, Excite, etc. should and do appreciate what we are doing.
>
> What they appreciate is that we are not "spamming" their submission forms.
> In fact, we submit pages by hand, as no technology that we've seen or can
> come up with beats the human mind in crafting these submissions just
right.
> A submission and optimization campaign for one client can easily take 6
> weeks. We are not overloading their servers with irrelevant submissions.
>
> They also appreciate this: we present their spiders with extremely
relevant
> pages optimized for what they are looking for. All of you have seen the
crap
> in the search results. Mostly, this is because of one thing -- pages that
> are not constructed to be easily read by a spider. The resulting confusion
> by the spider leads to the mammoth indexes and database that are the
search
> engines having a load of crap in them.
>
> For instance, a hypothetical company is named Neanderthal Systems. They
are
> actually a manufacturing company that makes clocks. The title of the HTML
> page says "Welcome to Neanderthal" and has a big-ass image on the home
page
> with no alt text -- just a logo and some clock designs. It's a beautifully
> designed page, and is the perfect web presence for the company. The first
> text on the page says "Neanderthal grew from the primordial sludge of New
> York's Love Canal in 1978. Since then, we've become a 50 million dollar
> company with 200 employees."
>
> What does the search engine's spider see? "Neanderthal" and "Neanderthal"
> and "New York" and "Love Canal". The spider categorizes these pages as
> having something to do with neanderthals. How accurate is that in
describing
> this web page? This is where the enormous amount of irrelevant crap comes
> from that's in all of the major search engines. Poorly constructed pages
(at
> least from the point of view of a spider).
>
> Wouldn't it be better for everyone -- Neanderthal Systems and those of us
> using a search engine -- if the spiders got it right? Good results for
> "clock" and "clock design" and "clock manufacturing". No incorrect
results,
> and people get to find Neanderthal quicker and easier. No longer is
> Neanderthal Systema misfiled, or way down in the list of clocks and clock
> manufacturing.
>
> What we really do is create alternative pages that read and index well by
> robots and spiders. The robot doesn't care about the most beautifully
> designed and perfect-looking site. We help the search engines quickly find
> and index content correctly.
>
> None of this is false advertising. None of this is trying to trick the
> search engines into listing a site in the wrong category. What good would
> that do either the company or searchers? We're just trying to get the
right
> content indexed and categorized by the major search engines. We are
catering
> to how their technology works.
>
> And because we cater so well to their technology, we get good results,
with
> most of our clients landing in the top 10 or top 20 of a search result
set,
> but only for those words and phrases that we believe describes that
company.
> We systematically present what the search engine is looking for, rather
than
> leaving it up to chance.
>
> Just my two cents worth.
>
> -------------------------------
> Kraig Larson, Creative Director
> Ciceron Interactive -- Web Strategy, Design & Ventures
> kraig(at)ciceron.com -- http://www.ciceron.com
>

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