meta justified

[pixelmonkey]

it buggs me to find that several homesite, geocities, and other free hosting hacked up, one time content, SPAMage, broken link, broken image sites seem to display high on search engines! what is going on?! when you view the source, and NO meta's are there! but since the site was started in march of 97 from someone that hasent done an update since april of 97! what is it? is the longer content (static or otherwise) posted the more valueable it becomes? should everyone start flop over sites with freebie host like these, that contain nothing more then a few broken images and several links to our main Domain we want listed?

i'm not slaming free host, or search engines, but im' just wanting some answers!


why should static free sites even be considered by a search engine?
chris<pixelmonkey>:monkey:

[cgutzmer]

This is what I have found from personal experience. Sites that have been online for a long length of time, tend to get better rankings, especially if they started out in a category that did not have much competition at the time. For example how many website designers were there in 1997 compared to now? There are also ways to hide your meta tags if you really want too, but that is unlikely in the kind of site you are talking about. There is a way to combat these static sites that really have been unchanged for years... You can resubmit that site to the search engine you found it on and when it gets spidered, it should get removed.

Chris Gutzmer
www.gutzmerwebdesign.com

[Clarence]

True, sites that have been along for a longer time often have better rankings.

When it comes to meta tags you have misunderstood their importancy. The only major search engine that uses them much for anything else than descriptions is Altavista.

Site content and site theme has gotten more and more importancy.

One more thing, why couldn´t there be good static sites. There are many content areas in which nothing needs to be changed.

[pixelmonkey]

Originally posted by Clarence
There are many content areas in which nothing needs to be changed.

i agree with you on that, however look at the stats of the web. most static content currently posted isnt usable by viewers, due to outdated events.


the monkey just needs a vacation
chris<pixelmonkey>:monkey:

[cgutzmer]

I agree with that. I did not mean that static sites should be removed just because they don't get updated. I was referring to sites that are mostly broken links with little to no content that have not been updated in a long time yet still ranked fairly high on search engines.

There is no substitute for good static content to get a decent ranking on most search engines so far as I can tell.

[Clarence]

In my experience sites with broken links often rank lower, but thats just my 2 cents.

[cgutzmer]

They do rank lower if they are broken when the site is initially indexed. Not necessarily true if the link has become broken after the site is listed with the search engine. I know that many of the search engines do spider exisiting listed sites on a regular basis but unfortunately not all of them.

Chris

[marjamar]

Up until 3 weeks ago, I was pulling my hair out over attempting to get some exposure for my business site. I must have tried many dozens of different ways to submit my site to the major search engines, with almost no success. There is a little story in this...

It's so funny cause a couple of years back, I produced one of those "Dancing Baby" videos I thought was pretty good and made a simple page with it on it and only submitted it to 1 or 2 engines. No more then 1 week later I found my site on 3 or 4 engines. Within a couple of weeks after that I was getting 1500 hits a day to my site!!! I stated getting so much email, I could not read it all! In fact, my local ISP here in the Orlando area sent me a bill for excess traffic to the tune of $2,700.00!! This was a $19.95 all you can eat ISP, but in the fine print anything over so much bandwidth and they could charge me by the mb.

Well, the owner and I got to be pretty good friends over the next month or two. He was real nice about it and didn't mind getting the extra exposure I guess, so I didn't have to pay anything extra.

All of that to say, it took almost nothing to get listed then - with bigtime hits coming in. Now after a couple of months of effort, I was only listed on Altavista...

So, back to 3 weeks ago. I found on of all places networksolutions.com a $30.00 package which would list me in GoTo.com and half-a-dozen other sites within 48 hours and also spider my site for changes at least weekly for the next full year. I signed up and within 24 hours - believe it or not I was NO.1 under quite a few of my keyword phases on GoTo, MSN, and very high in a couple of others.

I could not believe it!! I sent email out to a bunch of friends to verify this, but by the next morning my placement changed -- way down.

Very strange indeed. Has anyone else ever had anything similar happen?