meta tag abuse

However, porn sites often throw in lots and lots of keywords, mostly at least somehow porn-related, in an attempt to draw more people to their site through search engines. Likewise, they repeat keywords, because some search engines will rate a page higher if the search terms show up more times.

Besides the keywords, sites that want to abuse the search engines have other ways of doing so. One is to put the words they want searched into the page for a frameset (the users will not see them, because the frameset only defines the sizes and arrangement of frames on a page and the pages to load into the frames, if their browsers support frames). Another is to hide them inside scripts or divisions that are not displayed. A really dirty trick is to serve the search engines' spiders different pages than they serve the rest of the world. Altavista was hit by this really bad a couple years ago, when about 10 sites in the .cx domain submitted hundreds of thousands of pages with hundreds of miscellaneous words and phrases each, so that almost any search, even one for multiple words, found some of their pages; anybody else going there was redirected to a porn site.

A good search engine would have a heuristic to decide when a web page was trying to be manipulative with keywords, say, if there were more than 20 of them, and ignore all of them for that page.

Most search engines have stopped accepting meta tags on the basis of this usage, and tend to search on the basis of Title content and the contents of the first line or two of the page, depending on the content limit of that particular web spider.

Also, most spiders are now programmed to look out for and curtail usage of pages containing recurring words such as the usage above, though some can still be fooled with multiple use meta tags as used above.

Aside from the obvious tactic of non-porn websites using pornography-related words to attract traffic, it seems that some unscrupulous websites apparently use non-porn-related rare words by embedding them in the html, so that their sites appear high in the result sets of search engines. Rare words are good for this purpose because their incidence on the Web is quite low. Unsurprisingly, therefore, on typing 'heptaspermous' into Google, I obtained the following (partial) list of sites:

• Online Dictionaries at Datasegment.com and unofficial Webster listings
• Self-Promotion.com (A site FULL of advice on web sites and such things, including lists of ALL available domain names. Anyone interested in www.heptaspermous.com?)
• FREE Sizzling hot Asians Movies
• Hidden Changing Room Cameras
• FREE sizzling hot Free Play Online Gambiling (yes, that's what it says)
• MEGA Bondage Force

...the list goes on. A typical Google text snapshot from the page it has found would be this:

laryngorrhagia redeemably heptaspermous Photos Sexy. photochronography overimaginativeness ...

Note: Most of these words are not listed on Everything, which may indicate that (being mostly medical or scientific terms) they have come into being later than 1913.

Thanks to Professor Pi for suggesting that I re-name this writeup, as very few people were likely to find it under 'heptaspermous'.