P3D Stereophotographer foul play

["Mark Blum" <markb@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Shelly wrote in response to my post:

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...
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...

This is what the webmaster had to say on the subject:

No, the only thing you have to do to re-submit a site to most search engines
is to re-submit the same URL. The system has no idea who you are, and
doesn't care in most cases. All you're doing is re-tasking a spider. When
the spider hits the site which was previously indexed, it reports back to
the engine, the engine removes all prior references, and re-prioritizes the
site based on the rules for that particular engine. Anyone can do it to any
site on the internet, anonymously. That's how you add sites, and that's how
you remove dead links (and perform malicious tinkering).

Now not all search engines have the same set of rules by any means. Some
engines have code specifically designed to try and filter out erroneous
keyword spam and find the "true" content of the site based on the material
contained within (rather than meta tags alone). None of these schemes is
perfect, which is why some people get burned, like your friend. You can
avoid some of these pitfalls by making sure you have no more than, say, 10
keywords. Most engine are also looking for links and urls contained within
the site that contain the main keyword.

Yet other engines (Google for instance), prioritize sites based on the
number of other sites that have links to it. No search engine knows how much
traffic a site gets, contrary to popular belief. In order to do that, a
spider would have to have access to server logs or wussage - they don't.

There are about 20 basic rules for setting up a "doorway" page for your site
that _most_ engines will like. I spent quite awhile making yours very
attractive to several engines, which is why we ranked to high (luck has very
little to do with it:).

Our site was re-submitted - no doubt about it:(

Dan also said:

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 think Dan must be right about this and I certainly invite anyone with a 3D
site to link to mine at www.redshift.com/~markb/ . I intend to make many
more links as soon as I get around to it. I was hot under the collar when I
posted my message and I agree with Dan that by and large the 3D community is
a very good one.

Mark