P3D Re: Stereophotographer foul play

[Dan Shelley <dshelley@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Blum wrote:
> 
> I am saddened to report a recent web based incident that casts a stereo
> photographer in a very poor light. I recently put up a website at
> www.redshift.com/~markb/ . The webmaster, my brother Jon, submitted it to
> several search engines. When it got picked up, a search for the term
> stereophotography listed my site as the 1st entry on Yahoo and the 2nd entry
> on MSN. 

Mark - first, conratulations on the site. It's very nice. I was
surprised to find it by accident a month or so ago. Second, you have no
idea how lucky geting the placement you received on these two search
engines was. Cograts that you had such placement ever! =)

> My pleasure at this was short lived. Somebody, obviously someone
> else with a website featuring "stereophotography" caused my site to
> be"bumped" off
> Yahoo and MSN by submitting my URL again.The fact  that I couldn't even find
> my listing
> a week after being #1 can only mean somebody resubmitted my URL(as
> opposed to the search engine lowering the ranking). 

This may or may not be the case. I got a note back from AOL's search
engine folk after tring to figure out why I was removed from their
listings only to be told that their "system" had determined that I had
keywords on my site designed to trick people into finding it even
thought they were not about the "reaL" subject matter of the site.
Obviously, no human had ever visited my site... Such is life. 

There is no way for another human (who doesn;t work for that saerch
engine company) to submit your site to be removed from a search engine.
The only way this is (maybe) possible is if your site is no longer in
existence, and the second attempt by the search engine to "catalog" you
site will not find it, resulting in it's removal. If it's still there,
it simply gets re-evaluated and updated in the links. You will find that
most search engines do not come anywhere close to listing "everything"
available out there, and often list things for a while, only to drop
them later if they do not get used enough to be deemed "important" to
their bottom line - ie and advetising draw... 

> So Jon resubmitted our
> URL. 

A good idea. This should be done routinely when your site contents are
updated.

> I know that Jon was highly tempted to resubmit the first 100 other
> stereophotography
> links as well, which probably would have sent the perpetrator a message that
> one
> of the people he screwed over returned the favor. 

This actually probably would have helped them all...

> Unfortunately it also
> would have hurt a lot of other innocent people, so we are just
> going to have to deal with it. Unfortunately it could take awhile for the
> site to
> get listed again and there's no guarantee the same jerk  won't play the same
> nasty trick again.

A better solution would be to ask all the 3D folk that have web pages if
they might link to your site. This will generate FAR more traffic than
the search engines will. Trust me on this one... I have had over 190,000
individual vistors to my 3D site in teh past three years. Most of them
have come via links from other 3D sites.

> I am feeling like an innocent because I was laboring under the belief that
> the relatively small group of vendors of stereo products or services on the
> web were above these sort of cut throat business practices.

I think most are. I have only run in to one or two folks who have
repeatedly done "malicious" things to me. I myself have probably done a
stupid thing or two along the way, but nothing cut-throat, and none of
the people I routinely deal with have either. We are basically a very
"safe" community IMHO. You have been on the P3D list for a while now,
and aside from the occasinal strong opinion, I think you would agree
it's a very cordial place...

> Perhaps there is some hope of embarrassing these types of folks into more
> civil behavior befitting our fine hobby. You can bet I'll be watching the
> sites that pop up on the search "stereophotographer" and I hope that some of
> you will too.

I wish you the best of luck, but I hope you don't just assume that
anyone who shows up at the head of a search engine's returned results 
is "the guy", as that is highly unlikely IMHO again.

Dan Shelley
dshelley@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.dddesign.com/3dbydan