Re: WEB: Which registry service?

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Sun, 27 Apr 1997 19:36:05 -0700 (PDT)


> Here's a tip: in the header of your pages, put a paragraph of 0 size
> type that has multiple copies of all the key words and phrases. Since
> the header is what gets read first, even engines that read only the
> first 50 or 100 words will flag you as having multiple mentions of the
> key phrases you think people will use to search with, so your pages will
> come up first on the returns list as having the most relevancy to the
> query.

No! No! Never do such a hideous, incompatible, dishonest thing like
that. Some search engines have expressed interest in taking appropriate
countermeasures to such subversion, and I applaud them for doing so.
HTML written correctly, with keywords placed once in the header in META
tags, with headers marked properly and not obscured by Netscape tricks,
with ALT text in all the images, and correctly spelled and structured,
will be well-indexed by every present search engine, and any future
engines that base their algorithms on the design of HTML. Wasting one's
time fooling the existing naive engines will only require you to redo
it later, and detract from the value of efforts trying to make search
engines useful.