Re: <a href="" meta="">

> which is about information, not 'keyword stuffing'

The problem is that tools that can be used for one job are often
usurped for other jobs.  As a result, search engine operators 
have policies that are designed to cope with the real world, not
with a world behaving nicely.  Even the most respectable of
blue chip companies have been known to keyword stuff with white on
white text - the keywords tend to be relevant in those cases, but
it is still producing a page that doesn't match the visible content.

You are using an end justifies the means argument, but the people
trying to increase their sales consider their sales a justified
end.

When making proposals, you have to consider how the technology will
be abused and how the abuse counter-measures will impact you.

If you want to make reccommendations with current search engines, you
need to make those reccommendations explicit and visible and then,
for popularity based engines like Google, make your page popular.

As I hinted, there are ideas, I think amongst the semantic web people,
for having mechanisms for reccommending pages with specific annotations,
but these seem to be limited to a small academic community at the moment.
One reason for this is probably that commercial web sites are not in the
businesss of reccommending other commercial web sites (they rarely even
link to them).  Another reason might be that the search engine operators
see too much potential for abuse - any means of abusing them *will*
be used; that's the way the world works.  Yet another reason might be
the legal risks associated with making negative comments.

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2002 02:09:52 UTC