A study revealed that younger people have put their trust in search results such that they will readily take the number
one listings as the most relevant, even though it might not be in reality.
Older people are less trusting though and they will even drill down the results up to a few pages (more than three) down the line.
There is also a tendency to ignore advertisements on web pages, including adverts like
Adwords and Adsense on Google associated websites. }}
It use to be humans that collate and rank websites and their results
were listed on directories. Results was listed under the alphabetical
order so if your website name starts with an 'a', you will be listed on
top. It is however no more possible due to the large number of
websites so computer program robots are used instead. As present
robots are not intelligent enough, it could only read text content. It
can't read diagrams and animations, so if your pages consist mainly
of graphical contents, the robots will ignore you, or perhaps slot your
page listings to something that is less relevant.
But sometimes, a picture paints a thousand words, so you will need
to put an 'alternate tag' next to your picture file so that the robots can
categorize it properly. Increasingly, websites are designed with flashy
images such that it becomes annoying to visitors. Search engines are
not very favorable to these flashy sites and might rank them very low.
If you want the search engine to rank you high, optimize your text,
keywords and page layout.
As search engine robots diet is mainly text, unscrupulous webmaster
used various methods to trick it into getting high rankings.
They used
cloaking methods like invisible text and redirect pages to show
different pages to the search robots and web viewers.
Such tricks
should not be considered if you want to remain clean in the eyes of
search engines. Some tricksters even use CSS stuffing's to cheat on
the search engines and it would be a matter of time before the search
engines caught up with them.
"If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index.
Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines". }}
Most webmasters is worried about duplicate contents because search
engines treat them as spams. The thing is that you might not even
know whether you have them out there on the net. If you have a rich
content site, chances are that someone else might have copied it and
put them in their website without your knowledge.
The search engines might then treat your site as the one that is duplicating the
contents, although yours was the original site with the content.
Fortunately, search robots cache their files with a date, so those with
the earlier date will be given the benefit. However, robots have
infrequent visits to sites, so theoretically, they could spider the copied
site first before they spider your site, thus treating your copy as a
duplicate!