Chris: Articles post-Florida

**ozgression** · 01-14-2004, 08:58 PM

Originally posted by Chris
How easy is it to manipulate your title tag or domain?

<Title> tag: Easy, but you have to choose ONE or TWO terms instead of many terms. That is, you cannot simply get all the SERPs you want for any keyword on your page because of your PR. I believe it is given more importance than PR and anchor text for this reason.

Domain: Well easy enough I guess. But i meant that a search for "cars" will bring up cars.com before myboringsiteforcars.com (this is taking PR and anchor text out of the mix in this example). Naturally, the better quality sites, usually have the more relevant domain names, thus making domain manipulation harder (although not impossible).

Originally posted by Chris
Of all things, PR and anchor text are the hardest things to manipulate because they require either the help of another webmaster, or for you to have another site that was linked to by other webmasters. [/B]

Wrong. You can buy a text link on a PR9 site for a few hundred dollars. I see threads/forums/sites everywhere trying to exploit this. Let alone sites that spam guestbooks/forums/blogs.

Also, instead of rewarding the most relevant sites, PR and anchor text rewards the most SEO savvy (ie. us

). Therefore, I believe Google gave less importance to PR and anchor text. Not discounting them completly, but giving them far less importance than before.

Oddly enough, simply keeping the Google PageRank from displaying on the toolbar would get rid of the problem of PR manipulation. Displaying PR has no use at all to web surfers.

Anyway, my opinion is just that, my opinion. I am not passing what I say off as facts...

cheers
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Honda Atlas Cars Pakistan specifications

**Chris** · 01-14-2004, 09:34 PM

Wrong. You can buy a text link on a PR9 site for a few hundred dollars. I see threads/forums/sites everywhere trying to exploit this. Let alone sites that spam guestbooks/forums/blogs.

How is this different from:

Domain: Well easy enough I guess. But i meant that a search for "cars" will bring up cars.com before myboringsiteforcars.com (this is taking PR and anchor text out of the mix in this example). Naturally, the better quality sites, usually have the more relevant domain names, thus making domain manipulation harder (although not impossible).

People who can afford the higher quality domains tend to have higher quality sites. People who can afford to pay for text links are the same people who can afford to pay for nicer domains.

You can simply divide it into those who have money and those who do not. Those with money can afford to pay better designers, they can afford to pay employees, they can afford to pay for content, they can afford to pay for domains, and they can afford to pay for links.

If it is your opinion that people with money tend to have better sites then buying text link advertising isn't so bad.

PR can definitely be manipulated, but it is harder to manipulate that just about anything else. It doesn't cost me a few hundred dollars to manipulate my title tag.

Also title tags are not given more important than PR/Anchor Text and the "one or two words" thing is irrelevant. First of all you have more than enough room for a good 4 or 5 words if you want them, the keyword being if. Most people focus mainly on a single word or phrase for each page. There will be secondary keywords to be sure but only one main one.

Even considering that I think if you checked most page titles are longer than the incoming links that point to those pages, as such anchor text provides less keyword room than titles.

**chromate** · 01-15-2004, 05:23 AM

There's something wrong with saying "anchor text is more important than PR." I don't think it's correct to even compare them in the first place. This is because there's no constant that's common between them. It's like saying "this is a long path". Well, compared to what? PR is less important... Compared to what? Anchor text? It just doesn't work because they're hardly related.

For example. A PR10 site is useless until you lend context to the PR through anchor text and the like. It's hard to explain, but I always think of PR as "empowering" the content you do have.

**Best.Flash** · 01-15-2004, 01:56 PM

Originally posted by Chris Other than if I mention Google not stemming.

It looks like your saying here Google have stopped stemming post Florida?

**flyingpylon** · 01-15-2004, 02:44 PM

I don't mean to speak for Chris, but I took that to mean that if he mentioned in the article that Google does not do stemming, that he would need to update the article to say that Google does do stemming now. (sorry if I'm wrong about that Chris)

**Chris** · 01-15-2004, 03:34 PM

You're correct.

**snoopers** · 01-18-2004, 10:23 AM

Chris, thanks for the link.

How could the theory apply to http://www.tropicalresorts.org/?

All of its backlinks come from a physics site, yet it is ranked 2nd for the search term "tropical resorts" (which got 73k searches according to Overture)!

**Shawn** · 01-18-2004, 10:29 AM

Tropical Resorts isn't a popular search term. It receives less than 50 searches a day.

**snoopers** · 01-18-2004, 10:37 AM

Which tool are you using?

Try this

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/

**chromate** · 01-18-2004, 10:40 AM

try wordtracker.com ... it tends to be more accurate.

**snoopers** · 01-18-2004, 05:59 PM

Wordtracker only uses results from Altavista.

Overture is very accurate, because its their direct logs.

**ozgression** · 01-18-2004, 06:54 PM

Try this tool... http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Search both

From their site
Why do they differ so greatly? Overture's data is based on more searches, so the values are going to be higher than Wordtracker's in most cases. This does not mean Wordtracker's data is less valuable (keep in mind that they are relative to each other). Also, Wordtracker differentiates between plural and singular forms (which Overture does not).

________
Suzuki RGV500

**chromate** · 01-19-2004, 03:55 AM

Originally posted by snoopers
Wordtracker only uses results from Altavista.

Overture is very accurate, because its their direct logs.

That's precisely why it's not very accurate

Wordtracker only uses altavista in the trial version. In the paid version you get a nice selection of search engines to compare stats for. It's easy to predict what the google result would be based on the Altavista result anyway.