I found that some blogs is in top #5 for some very competitive word (such as "bedroom furniture"). Sometimes, they are just nothing but a site that redirects to another small directory with the search result of bedroom furniture. This really frustrated me, how can these redireting site ranked so well? Do they use some "tricks" in keyword and description. I've noticed the use of <link ref="home" title="keyword" href="/keyword"> what's with this <link href="home">? ? Actually I saw the use of <link> is recommended by W3C. Anyone familiar with the use of this tag? thanks in advance
You can read about the <LINK> element here... http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#edef-LINK No, they just have a lot of backlinks. You can see which sites are linking to that site to see why it's getting such a good ranking by searching for this in Yahoo... linkdomain:www-bedroomfurniture.blogspot.com or this in Google (or AltaVista)... link:www-bedroomfurniture.blogspot.com
Yes those spam blog sites has lots of backlinks as a result of link spamming, usually done using Black Hat method.
but as search engines getting more sophisticated, how come thses black hat seo still work and work so well?
Indeed temporary in itself, but there are enough of them about for it to not seem that way sometimes...
Something that is warned and penalised against by the search engines, cloaking for example. This sort of tactic usually bring short term gains but will get you penalised or banned in the long run.
excessive keyword stuffing, keywords in the same colour of background (hidden keywords), door way pages are few of the methods considered as black hat tech... using bh tech you can run but cant hide... useful for short run and get your website banned (no where) if done for a continous basis...
gettind good ranking using cloaking, doorway pages, invisible text, masking a good ranked site like yours etc
Black hat methods can also be things like using software to blast 100's or 1,000's of blogs with comments hoping to get a few links out of it. It's an automated thing and it gets them a lot of traffic in a short period of time. Usually Black hats do this for perscription drug or gambling sites to rank high on various keywords in those areas. Yes it's temporary, but they keep creating new sites every day, so they have a steady income.
Black Hats = the bad guys White Hats = the good guys Just watch any old cowbow movie to understand the origin of this phrase. Pagerank? We don't need no steenking pagerank!
Yahoo and MSN both are the best engines for black hat tactics like link exchange sites and three way linking. The reason you don't see these blog sites ranking for these terms on Google is the Yahoo search engine is not sophisticated enough to calculate the authority of the links to determine which are passing relevant popularity. For these engines it's all about the number of links, with google it's a bit more complicated.
Student- that was well put, and sums it up nicely- google IS more complex, and as such harder to rank higher (front page etc). MSN is supposed to have a new algo out though that is similar to google's sophisticated link analyzer...
does link exchange still work for yahoo? i heard google has reducede their importance to almost none.
In my experience very targeted link exchanges have an effect on google, anything that isn't directly related has virtually no effect IMO
I don't believe that google reduce the importance of back link, it so happened that they are more strict for back link relevance. Unlike Yahoo and MSN you can link exchange to any kind of site. And yes back link is still a big factor to get better position in yahoo.