TW Blog :: Archives for May 2004

Google Flashback?

Relates to SEO

While performing some SEO on my mate's longboard skates site earlier this evening, I decided to have a quick play around with the -nonsense exclusion parameter on Google to see what it would bring up. This was a familiar technique during the early fallout of hurricane Florida to see pre-Florida results, which Google reportedly disabled prior to Christmas of last year. The following search phrase certainly bought up a different set of SERPs:

longboard skates -abcd

I took this further adding additional exclusion parameters to see if the SERPs changed. The surprise came when I hit eight parameters (giving the maximum 10 words allowed in a search query):

longboard skates -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd

The top 20 results looked very familiar to the pre-Florida results for longboard skates when Still Stoked had maintained top placement for a considerable period of time. (And rightly so being not only the home of the Landsurfer, the world's longest production longboard skateboard, but also one of the first dedicated longboard skates companies in the UK.)

The recent rebuild of the site had actually been in response to the dramatic demise of the site following Florida - disappearing altogether from the top 100 results. It is satisfying to see that by following the guidelines for Web Standards and Accessibility the site is working its way back up the SERPs with each new visit from the Googlebot.

Since I am discussing Google hacks, why not have a look at Google Hacking Mini-Guide to learn some of the ways hackers can exploit Google's service.

Posted on Saturday, May 22, 2004 at 00:30:52.