28 replies to this topic

[DanThies]

If you're just dying to keep a word from showing up in the search engines, character codes are a much easier way to do it, and shouldn't pose any problems to your visitors... (the ones you want, that is.)

Sort of related, with Google Adwords you can specify certain words that you don't want your ads to appear with. Would be nice if you could specify that to the crawlers, but I can't even imagine how they'd implement something like that.

[compar]

Good thought, but what if the text string is within text paragraphs pulled from a database?

Webstream

It doesn't seem to me that there is anyway to not be found for certain terms.

Why doesn't your client simply put a polite statement on his installation inquiry page that says something like this:

"Welcome to our site. Unfortunately we cannot offer installation support on products purchased elsewhere."

or in the case of the merchant who wants only to sell locally

"Please note we will only ship orders to customers within (some geographical area)"

I know some people may even ignore this, but it seems to me it is the price of doing business on the Internet. It is not brick and mortar. It is a different market space. To some degree it is take it or leave it.

[mcanerin]

One other option is to use Flash, since it can pull in text and database queries, and is very difficult to have show up on search engines.. much to my regret, but we will leave that alone for this post

The problem, of course, is that I'm assuming that you can't just put all the stuff related to unwanted keywords in their own page or subweb - otherwise you could just use a robots.txt on those pages.

You could use a database to place images into your content, images with words on them. Or how about good old frames? You could probably use dozens of techniques that we have been telling people NOT to use. Basically you are doing anti-SEO.

So lower the keyword density, don't put it into ALT's, make sure you don't use them in links, don't mention it in Headings, titles or put it in bold, etc.

That should be interesting. We could have a contest on who could take a page with X amount of content and Y number of keywords and see who could make the best/worst ranking pages...

I'm not much help, I'm afraid, but hopefully someone here is smarter than me (shouldn't be hard, given the company). Good Luck,

Ian

[compar]

You could use a database to place images into your content, images with words on them. Or how about good old frames? You could probably use dozens of techniques that we have been telling people NOT to use. Basically you are doing anti-SEO.

Ian,

He does not want not to be found. His concern is that because he is well optimized for Blue Widgets -- and he want to be well optimized because he wants to sell a bunch of blue widgets -- that the search engine may also list his site when someone searches for 'install blue widgets' . He is not optimized for install, but the damn search engines may list his site under the 'install' query.

So he doesn't want to practice anti-SEO. He want to say to the search engines don't you dare give my site to some dead beat who searches on 'install' in association with blue widgets. He thinks these people are simply nuisance visitors and he want the search engines to help him hide from them.

Now the possibility he doesn't seem to have addressed is maybe the people seeking installation help didn't search on' install' at all but simply assumed that anybody who sell blue widgets would also have installation advice, because everyone knows blue widgets are trick to install. And only searched on his highly optimized blue widget keywords in the first place.

In this case the search engines would have to interrogate all searcher and inquiry whether or not their intentions were honorable before presenting them with a SERP.

It's getting late and I'm getting silly. I better sign off this thread before someone thinks I'm being sarcastic.

[Clintorius]

Since SE's do not interpret JavaScript this inline script should also work - at least for small amounts of text:


<p>
I do not want search engines to note that I am using
<script>document.write('abusive')</script>
words in my text.
</p>

Results in:

"I do not want search engines to note that I am using abusive words in my text."

The word abusive will only be visible to the user of the final browser rendered page.
Not user friendly to text readers though. And please don't use abusive words on your pages;)

[compar]

Results in:

"I do not want search engines to note that I am using abusive words in my text."

The word abusive will only be visible to the user of the final browser rendered page.
Not user friendly to text readers though. And please don't use abusive words on your pages;)

Clintorius,

How does this prevent the search engines from including his URL in the SERP for a word on which he does not want to be found?

[Clintorius]

How does this prevent the search engines from including his URL in the SERP for a word on which he does not want to be found?

Say you do not want to be indexed for the word 'abusive'. Then you must make sure the word can not be read by the robot. However, you still want to use the word in the human copy.

SE reads: "I do not want search engines to note that I am using words in my text."
Humans: "I do not want search engines to note that I am using abusive words in my text."

A little hidden-text-trick that turns things around. We hide things for the SE's and not for the humans. The idea is that the SE's will skip the <script>...code to print onto the screen..</script> part, because they only can read the pure text and not interpret inline JavaScript code. Thus the page can not be indexed for the 'virtual part' of the copy.

If this technique is used to make sure searchers are not misguide to the page is must be very anti-spam However without some clever CMS is will be a hell to keep certain words out of the site.

[Scottie]

Honestly, I believe if you have time to spend *hiding* words in your site, you can better spend your time doing lots of other things. Go play with your kids or your dog!

If people are not looking for the content you provide, they should be easily able to figure that out and click back to the search results. If they can't, you need to spend your time working on your copywriting!

Unless you are just paying an arm and a leg for bandwidth because of the huge volumes of traffic you are getting for negative keywords, I wouldn't worry about it.

[qwerty]

I agree with Scottie, but I've still got a few little questions about this.

I'm curious about whether a browser would know to format the script-generated text to be the same as the surrounding text. I suppose I could just test it, but I'm sure you can tell me faster than that.

Also, I can already think of an abuse of this. Let's say you're searching the web looking for references to your company. Obviously, you're going to do this by querying your company name on a search engine. You're not going to find a page where someone has placed <script>document.write(company x is evil)</script>

[Scottie]

If I wanted the world to know that "company x" is evil... why would I hide it...? Most people want that negative publicity to rank highly- that's why they build it.

I see what you are saying, qwerty, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of putting it there in the first place? I'm sure there are other devious uses for this, though...

[qwerty]

If I wanted the world to know that "company x" is evil... why would I hide it...?

I'm just thinking they might get away (at least for a bit longer than they would have otherwise) with making libellous statements using this method.

It's one thing to say "our product is superior to the one made by company x for the following reasons". There's certainly no reason to hide that. But it's quite another matter to sneak in something to the effect of "the management team at company x spend their lunch hour performing ritualistic sacrifices and worshipping craven images."

[DanThies]

The whole point of this, was how to keep a site from showing up on irrelevant searches. We've all had our sites suddenly start getting traffic for silly things.

When it's irrelevant, but also costly to deal with (like when you sell products but don't want to answer a bunch of questions about installation), I can see good reasons to do something about it.

Website Promotion Central used to get lots of hits for "bicycle repair," and I ended up using robots.txt to block the page they were landing on - people were forever thinking we were trying to trick them into visiting, by using a bike repair site in a case study.

[air-dog]

I'm curious about whether a browser would know to format the script-generated text to be the same as the surrounding text.

qwerty, I'd like to say that browsers always format script-generated text the same as the surrounding text, but what I can say is that I've never seen a case where the script-generated text doesn't format the same as the surrounding text.

This is to say that if the script is coded within a formatted region of the page and there are no other format modifiers it will format like the surrounding text.

And only with the browsers I test with:)

[qwerty]

If an entire page is the cause of unwanted traffic, of course it makes sense to just keep it from getting spidered. I think that in the (hopefully very rare) case of some snippet of text that's sending the wrong people to a particular page and is requiring you to waste time and money dealing with people who've got the wrong idea about your services, the only thing to do is edit the text.