What Is This?

[BluegrassGardener]

I ran a search through Yahoo this morning for - pink flowering dogwood - and one of the results (4) was a bit off base compared to what I was looking for. These sorts of sites interest me in the fact that I know what they are doing must be considered "illegal" search-wise, but I'm trying to figure out how the sites are placed so high when there is no relevant content, or ANY content for that matter, whatsoever on the page other than an affiliate link hidden in the source. And the URL that the search engine shows for the page isn't the URL that the result resolves to. Is this "Cloaking" or some other trick used to fool the search engines? And if it is, why would someone spend so much time making all of those useless pages if it's only a matter of time before they are banned from the search engines? I'm sorry, things like this just have me wanting to understand the intricacies of it all. Could sites like this help you understand better how the search engines read pages, or are you not seeing what the seacrh engine sees? Hope I'm not confusing anyone. I originally got on here this morning just to post and ask a question about EntropySearch, and you can see how far off track I've gotten.

 

About the EntropySearch deal. I used the search on the forums and google and could find nothing about it other than the fact that it's really not all that customizable. Is it not? I have things coming up in the search on our page that I don't want there and am not sure I should delete them from the site because I don't even know if they are used by other installed software. What to do? I may just dump it for now until I can find a better alternative. Anyone have any luck using this on their site?

 

BTW...If this is not the right place for this post, please feel free to move

 

Brian

[TCH-Thomas]

For your "About the EntropySearch deal" question, have a look at this thread

[BluegrassGardener]

For your "About the EntropySearch deal" question, have a look at this thread

 

 

As far as that goes, I believe I like the looks of the FastFind. I will be investigating that further. Also just for reference, I am having a problem with the EntropySearch on our site with our Flash Logo. It wasn't custom made and is sometimes a pain to work with. It takes three files to keep that darn thing going and they all have to be in the same folder. I just can't find out which folder EntropySearch is running out of so I can stick the text file in there. Ideas??

[TCH-Bruce]

I'm using FastFind and it works well. Easy to implement.

 

I believe EntrophySearch is in your cgi-bin folder.

Edited November 29, 2004 by TCH-Bruce

[BluegrassGardener]

I think I've pretty much given up on the EntropySearch (hate that though, cause it was so simple to get running with it). Nothing in the cgi-bin but randhtml.cgi, whatever that is? I'll give the FastFind a try and see how that goes. I like the features in it

[TCH-Bruce]

EntrophySearch doesn't appear to write anything to your site. You just insert the search form into your web pages. It will search all ASCII content on your site and you can exclude nothing. If you want a better search engine for your site, FastFind would be a good choice.

[Deverill]

Regarding the search engine portion of your question.

 

If the blurb the search engine gives you is not the same as the page you go to when you click it then it is almost certain they are cloaking. They set up the web code to say "If the visitor is googlebot (or some other engine's spider) then show this page else show another one."

 

The answer to "why" is that if they get 100 suckers and it takes the search engines 1 month to ban them then that's 3000 suckers paying $100 each which is $30,000.

 

The truth is that they can ban a site for these techniques but they usually don't unless it becomes a full-on major issue. Seach for "google banned traffic power" and see what happened to thousands of sites that were wiped from the face of the internet overnight.

 

You could study these sites to learn their tricks but it's best to make good solid pages that will never get banned that give your visitor what they want. Get the site "out there" and well seen and make it appealing to the visitors and make your money honestly and along the steady-and-sure method. The others work but so does the Nigerian 419 email scam.