How to Manipulate Search Engine Results in Your Favor

[DChapman]

DChapman submitted a new Article:

How to Manipulate Search Engine Results in Your Favor

Step One: [highlight]STOP[/highlight]

If you are trying to manipulate the search engine results in your favor or optimize your community for any specific keyword or keyphrases, you are making a common and potentially detrimental mistake. As a community owner, you must take the time to understand the true power of forums. Granted, there are current working methods to optimize your site so that it ranks high for a particular search term. And over the short term, you might get a few hundred or even a few thousand unique visitors per month thanks to that specific term. However, you are setting yourself up for disaster, and more importantly, you are not tapping into the true power of online forums.

What makes forums so special? Put simply, it is the incredible amount of unique content your members generate for you on a daily basis. I have successfully optimized sites for some highly competitive keywords in my time. However, not one of those keywords, no matter how popular, can compare to the traffic generating prowess of a content-rich community.

Contrary to what many "SEO Experts" might tell you, ranking in the top three results for a competitive term (on Google) is difficult and takes time. And if you actively work to manipulate the results for that term, you're more likely to get penalized than be successful. And to add insult to injury, as search engine algorithms improve, pages that reach the top of search results via manipulation/optimization are much less likely to stay there. Enter the beauty of forums. After no manipulation and implementation of a few "white hat" SEO techniques that improve crawlability of your community, you might soon find monthly results like this:

What the above image means is that in one month, this particular forum was found via more than 450,000 DIFFERENT search engine queries. Every single thread on your forum, once optimized using "white hat" SEO techniques, becomes a potential destination for people searching for that thread's subject matter. Sure, 500,000 people per month search for "funny videos", but getting ranked in the top 10 results for such a query is difficult. Whereas millions upon millions of people search for obscure keyphrases that will lead them to your forum simply because someone started a thread that happened to discuss that particular topic. This is further proof that content is king and your forum members create dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of new, content rich...

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[KeithMcL]

Some good advice there. Thanks

 

[simsim]

Thanks for the insightful article. I guess I have made the right choice by starting a forum, not sjut anyother kind of websites.

However, I'm not sure if I grasped the 'practical' impact of your argument. Does that means not implementing any SEO technique for my forum? Should I leave the meta keywords on my vB forum options empty in order to search bots to crawl more content off my site? And I'm really don't know what's 'white hat' SEO techniques anyway!

 

[LiveWire]

I have a question. I plan on opening a new site. Wouldn't it be okay to start the site using SEO urls? No necessarlly the product vBSEO, but if done correct could this benefit me and my newly founded site?

 

[LiveWire]

I think you answered my question here: http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20404

 

[PalePhoenix]

What's Step Two?

Just kidding. Good one, ZointsD. And the 'bizarre search words' thing is no joke:

 

[jward]

What makes forums so special? Put simply, it is the incredible amount of unique content your members generate for you on a daily basis. I have successfully optimized sites for some highly competitive keywords in my time. However, not one of those keywords, no matter how popular, can compare to the traffic generating prowess of a content-rich community.

Excellent post. Effective SEO will ensure that each individual thread is optimized for its content to maximize organic search engine traffic.

 

[Roody]

So let me get this straight as I understand it. You guys are making threads based off of titles mentioned in this thread and it has helped your numbers?

 

[DChapman]

So let me get this straight as I understand it. You guys are making threads based off of titles mentioned in this thread and it has helped your numbers?

For the most part, our members are doing it. However, the title of the thread doesn't have to be what you see screenshots of above. Those terms can simply be mentioned in the thread and if Google determines your thread to be relevant to that specific term, then you might end up gaining visitors to your site because of it.

 

[ANGELEYES ZONE]

Thnx

 

[cpvr]

Great article dude.

 

[ketann]

gr8 article and thanx for this.

very helpful for ppl like me.

 

[Scribbller]

Eh you told me the same thing in a thread a few months back but you still havent told me how do you optimize your site for number of keywords.

 

[Modfather]

Now THAT was pure brilliance David! Bravo! You truely are a Forum GENIUS!

 

[mickey78]

very informative post

 

[BigP]

Great Post. Very important info!

 

[angelinalove]

Thanks to share this usefull article with us. Some tips are very usefull for us.

 

[nricklee]

Thanks to let me know all about that.It might be helpful to me.

 

[alienrobotmonkey]

Manipulating Search Engine Results with a ragDOLS attack

Here's an article, well a blog, of course this is illegal to do, but interesting nonetheless, on the ultimate in SEO utilizing an emulation of a dDOS attack, but this doesn't attack, it services..yes, provides a service instead of denies (said service being the recipient of the service receiving ranking by induced traffic . I don't think it's been done before, and it's not like the old "google-bomb" trick.
Remember, you read it here ----> http://thesubquantum.blogspot.com/ first. If you haven't, read it there-that is, then send me an email with a link to where this has been done.
It's called a ragDOLS attack (randomly acquired & generated distribution of limited searches). GO ESTONIA!

 

[infoway111]

Yes forum is very important part of seo thesedays. Simply because of the number of content hence information you get per day from thousand of visitor per day on your forum.So building a strong forum is very necessary.