Wired has a great article online about Greg Boser who gets paid to make your website rank higher in the search engine results. We all know that it’s not as easy to change rankings as it was 10 years ago, but it still can be done. He get’s most of his clients through speaking engagements and gets paid on the results he gets. As he says in the article, “We make lot more money doing this.” here is some of the comments about search engines and manipulating them he had to say…
“I could create a blank page without a keyword anywhere present, or a 404 error message, and if I can get enough sites to link to it, I could get it to place first on Google,” Boser said. But it’s not just quantity, it’s quality. Theoretically, Boser could have five inbound links and end up as the No. 1 result — provided they originated from mega sites like Yahoo and MSN. Barring that, 5,000 links from cheesy guest books, online diaries, blogs, zany products, porn sites and anyone who honors link exchanges might do the trick… There are other techniques designed to fool search engines. One consists of cloaking pages by hiding text in website backgrounds in a way that users won’t see but that targets Google’s ranking technology. Another method is link spam, aka “blog comment spam,” in which automated bots plaster ads with return links on the comments pages of blogs. Most common are ads for pills, porn and casinos. Finally, there is “search spam,” which are machine-generated pages designed to appear in the engines to attract traffic (and ultimately increase revenue).