Reverse Searching for Meta Tags

Reverse Searching for Meta Tags
By James Timothy Faasse`

Reverse Searching is one of the old tricks to increase your sites rankings. Reverse searching is searching on your target meta keywords and checking the sites are returned in the results. By visiting those sites and checking their meta keywords you can get a general ball park idea of what big meta keywords are pulling in site traffic.

This used to work fairly well, but as search engine algorithms become better and better at detecting spam, this option holds less and less value. Search engines now check to see if a meta keyword is present in a meta tag, and if it *is* also present on the web page. If the meta keyword is not present on the page, the meta keyword receives less value or relevancy.

Additionally, many search engines are so slow at actually including pages in their index, the chances that you are looking at the actually source code that generated the high placement, is very slim. However, if you keep those two things in mind, you can sure make some educated guesses about which words are being used in the meta tags. If you are into it, check the date of the listing on the search engine (many show the date that the page was spidered in the results). That can kinda give you a clue as to how old the page is in the search engine database, and how hold it is on the web.

Here is where we get into specifics for each search engine. While reverse searching can work well to build keywords for one search engine, it will fail miserably on others. While one search engine will give high relevancy to keyword occurrence in one position, another will discount it entirely. It pays to reverse search on as many search engines as possible and compare the same sites generated page.

Additionally, some people are now running stealth keywords and you wont be able to detect if you are viewing true keywords or bogus keywords. You may also stumble upon a page that was designed for another search engine from the ne where you found it listed. You can get around this somewhat if you are using a browser that allows you to set both the USER_AGENT and referring URL. By setting the USER_AGENT to one of the major search spiders, and the referring URL to null, you can sometimes trick web pages into thinking you are from one of the major search engines and fessing up the real set of keywords. (I'm amazed at how often this works).

Reverse Searching for Clues

You can use reverse searching to see what sites are linked to your top competition. Infoseek and Altavista, allow you to enter "link:site url" to see what sites are linked to a particular page or even domain. By searching for the links to your competition, you can get a rough estimate of how many sites are linked to them. If you find that one of your competitors has five hundred links to it, while another has just fifty, you can assume who is the most successful. Visit that top linked site and see just what it is they are doing to get those links. Are they promoting their site by running a newsletter, a mailing list, or other promotional scheme.

Stealth Keywords

Ok, I admit it, I have a love-hate relationship with Cloaking and Stealth. The following was written during a hate phase.

Stealth keywords are keywords that are generated by a CGI program when a search engine spider has been detected.

Simply put: don't use hidden stealth keywords generated by CGI programs to target specific spiders or crawlers. Most of the search engines that this once worked on have taken notice, and it not only wont work, it can cause you serious grief and might cause the death of your website.

Some of the search engines have shadow spiders now, that use a different IP address and use a different (generic mozilla) agent. The shadow spider compares what keyword (html header) information it gets from one viewing to what it gets from the standard spider. If they don't match, they know that you've target them and can bury you deep in the search results in a heart beat (been there, done that, wont be back again).