Image SEO-Google images bombing

Image SEO is the use of search engine optimization tactics to make a particular image rank better in search results. The main methods to follow would be

1. Naming the image file appropriately. If you want your image to be the first result for say "coop search", name the file "coop-search.jpg". I use the hyphen as space would be interpreted as "%20".


2. The 'Alt' attribute or tag is used to contain the keywords. So i am putting Alt as "coop-search". Anyway Alt is not highly weighted these days.


3. Related content-since a image will get a higher ranking when the content is related to the image, i should have better chances. Most of the content here is related to search and search engines.


4. Longdesc(long description) can be used to give a detailed description of the image in another Html file.

So much for my image promotion. Can somebody google bomb a image? By that i mean to say can sites other than the one which originally hosted the image influence the results for a picture. This would amount to bandwidth theft and can be prevented. So the appearance of Images for a particular query is not actually google bombing as the search bots are unaware of the contents of the image.

Now to put my coop search image using all this info as below.The icon i use is the first image. The next one is the bigger image. May be i will use that as a banner.

Coop Search Firefox Mozilla search plugin

Coop search works wonderfully in any browser. You can access it using the CSE search or the coop search. However, if you use the Mozilla firefox browser you can add the coop search plugin to your browser.

Coop search can now be used directly to search for other google coop search engines. We made the search plugin for the coop search and pu it up at the mozilla sherlock website.You can get the firefox plugins at the mozilla sherlock website.

It does not have any bugs as far as we have tested. But feel free to let us know if any problems turn up. It should be possible to use it with IE7 onwards as microsoft is supposed to support sherlock search plugins.

Search Engine nightmare

The search engines such as the google search engine use extensive resources to index the various sites in the internet. They make use of advanced algorithms to provide the most suitable results for the users.Just imagine if the results offered by these powerful search engines is very similar to those offered by a simple javascript orPHP script.

I disscus one such javascript which tries to provide such results.And later look into some of the causes,solutions etc..

The Search engine nightmare is a simple javascript that shows a list of results which link to the top sites on the internet. It does not check for the exsistence of pages.It should be possible to do that using PHP and other server side scripts.You can compare the results with google using the last result.I plan to make a personalised version of Search engine nightmare as a google gadget later.

The increasing pouplarity of sites such as wikipedia, delicious, digg, urban dictionary,simpy etc.. has resulted in people linking to the same site for multiple words. The web 2.0, which is driven by user submitted or generated content has resulted in tremendous popularity of these sites which thrive on user provided content. The users who submit content also refer to this content and link to them whenever neccessary. So this effect leads to unintentional google bombing of these sites.

Moreover since these sites have implemented the no follow attribute, the sites that are tagged dont get indexed. The effect can be seen very easily in Google. Large number of search's give Wikipedia as the first result.Similarly Technorati, delicious,simpy,urban dictionary,other bookmarking services etc..also come up in search results.

I could recognise two types of words that get into this effect (which i like to call search engine klogging). The first type of words are those that are being used for the first time.For example "googleoop" is a word that has not been used. So a search for this gives a result that has links to Simpy,Rojo (a feed aggregator)..etc..Generally these words get results that are more relevant as time passes with more popular use.

The other type of words that get into this klogging of the search engine are "tag" words.These are very commonly used words that are used for tagging something.This may seem veryimproper results. But actually they are not. In fact when you search for "blog" it gives the blogs of a few people and companies. This is actually a 'wrong result'. For example the http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/ appears as top results but has nothing to do about a blog except that it is a blog.

Google seems to have realised this(not very sure of this) and has implemented a algorithm to overcome the effects of google bombing. The custom search engine also is a step in this direction. So basically when you want to search the web, you search the web using the expertise of somebody or your own expertise.The google custom search engine can be customised to search the sites that you have tagged using the google marker.The coop search provides a search tool to find the most suitable CSE(customized search engine) for a particualr query.

So does it mean that it is the end of good old fashioned web search engines?In most probability it is an end to the search engines that index the entire internet.The huge size of the internet is one good reason for this. But the same algorithms are now being used to index the selected number of sites.

A question that arises with these developments is--"will people pay to get tagged?
"If this catches up and spamming of bookmarking sites continues, it wil become a mess. Content can be stolen and tagged excessively to get traffic. Since the tagging sites dont check which content is original.

miserable failure after the algorithm update.

Look at results for miserable failure after the algorithm update.Although the site of Bush is gone, the resuls are showing blogs and news sites that have used the words 'Miserable failure'. So if google's aim was to show results which were not related to google bombing, that seems to have failed.

The effect of google bombing seems to have been overcome, if the definition of google bombing is "Mainpulation of results of google search engine to show results which dont have the words given in the query". The democratic nature of google search engine is proved by the new search results. But it is spam.

The first result has got a picture of Bush as well. So google will still be getting mails complaining how their results are politically biased!!!.

Impact of using google bombs on page rank

What is the impact of using google bombs on page rank of that page? It should go down right? Recently google updated their algorithm to overcome google bombs. So this may take a while to take effect on some of the more obscure or less popular google bombs.

Take a look at the google bomb project which has numerous google bombs. Even then it has got a page rank of five. So does it mean using google bombs has no impact on your ranking!!Although i did not find any direct relation between google bombing and page rank, it is suerly against the guidelines given by google.

Will the new algorithm penalise blogs for having used a google bomb?And what about penalising those blogs which talk about google bombs and hence spam the search results.

I took a look at results for miserable failure after the algorithm update.So if google wants to stop hate mail they have to penalise those who use the words bush and miserable failure on the same page.

SEEATDUMMY-Search Engine Experimentation Anchor Text Dummy

If you want to use this same name(SEEATDUMMY), use at your own risk. I am using this word for Search Engine Experimentation. So it is possible that it could be google bombed, google looped and what not.

SEEATDUMMY-Search Engine Experimentation Anchor Text Dummy

For each experiment i will be using the series SEEATDUMMY(number of the SEEATDUMMY). So i will not run out SEEATDUMMies quickly. Google search engine recognise "hello4590" as a different word from "hello4591". So i should not have any shortage of SEEATDUMMY's.

SEEATDUMMY1 is being used to find the effect of google lucky links on search engines.

Effect of Google "I am feeling Lucky" links on search engines

By "I am feeling Lucky" links i refer to a link to a website via google. Google search engine provides a button "I am feeling Lucky", by hitting this button the browser is directly taken to the page that appears as the first search result in google.Thus you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them. The feeling lucky link uses this method to link to a website.

As an example if i wanted to link to a wikipedia i could link using http://www.wikipedia.org/ to get a link with anchor text of Wikipedia linked as Wikipedia. If i were to use a i am feeling lucky link i would link using
http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia&btnI=I to get a link with anchor text of Wikipedia linked as Wikipedia.

You can find firefox greasemonkey scripts to do this type of linking. What if these links were added directly on the web pages. How would the search engine react to such links? Would this amount to Web Spam?Will this have any postive effect on the position of web pages in search results?

Since the link will be pointing to a google domain name it is possible that it will not get indexed. So will it be equivalent to a no follow link? However, since it has no referrer it could be used as a Dereferrer as well.

Will google give extra points to sites that use No follow link or google lucky links?

The no follow links can be linked to specific web pages while Lucky links link to only the first search result, so the chances of it being spam are reduced considerably!!.The disadvantage with no follow links is that they reduce the usefullness of search engines in some cases. It looks like this can be overcome to a certain extent using lucky links.

One could also use a Refresh link via google to link back to thier own site. Other dereferrer sites can also be used to do this.

To find answers to these questions and more let me do a test. As it would be a bad practice to target a query that can be used, i have choosen a the query "SEEATDUMMY1". If you know what is the effect of these links please do let me know.

Google Loop-will it take the bait?

The idea is to link to the google results page with the search query as the link text. I have been doing this using the klog generator, but this is the first attempt to see its effect on search results. The words i have choosen are google loop and googleoop. Assuming google will filter out its own search reult links, i will also link to Live search(since its fairly new) using the links google loop and googleoop

You can help me in this experiment by

• Copying and pasting the links google loop and googleoop (linking to these words using the same links as above). The first word had 29,600,000 results when i tried and the other one did not have any in google. And for live search google loop and googleoop.
• Bookmarking the search results for the above in google using Delicious, Simpy or whatever it is that you use.
• Spreading the word that such an experiment is on.
• Use any (legal) SEO tactics you know to achieve the same results

Feel free to let me know of any related information.This is a experiment to see if google will loop on its own results or that of other search engines if particular keywords are google bombed to the results page(What i like to call klogging). I am doing with no evil intention and will remove this post if it is causing problems or against guidelines of any sort after going through such warnings if any.

Google customised search can be made Delicious

Ok i have been ranting about how bad it is that you cant use your google search engine with Delicious and so on. Zooie made a product that actually uses your delicious bookmark, you can take a look at his actual post Google coop just got delicious. The service he has created is at http://idlivada.vpsland.com:8000/login.html. You need to give your login and password and also your cse id to generate the XML.

• you can Add Just bookmarks with the tag you specify
• search entire domain or restrict to only to what you have tagged using "*"
• use an algortihm to decide the best tag etc..

As soon as you give these and sepecify the features of your search engine as in the cse page, you get the XML code. You can upload this XML to get a search engine with your Delicious bookmarks.

But again, it does not get updated if you update your bookmarks..so its a kind of migrating service from delicious to google.I was hoping to make something along these lines for Simpy--i wanted to Call it Simpyfuge. Simpyfuge is supposed to use a simpy account and add these to your google results as much as you want. Hopefully this will not require you to upload XML give create a search engine etc..

Google customized search-is it just advanced search with default options?

Google launched google Co-op so that everyone could roll out her own search engine!! But is it just the advanced search with default search results? Or does it offer much more. Using advanced search you can restrict the domain to search and it has been used by many to provide a search box for their sites, such as

http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=www.w3schools.com&as_q=split

that will search only that site for that query.You can also restrict which domain not to search. Yes however google seems to go crazy when you try to limit the search to two or more domains.May be the syntax is wrong but"http://www.google.com/search?sitesearch=www.w3schools.com+www.javascript.com&as_q=array" gives some really weird results.

And again with google coop you can save which sites to restrict the search to.

Search Refinements-Another thing with coop is that it gives search result refinements based on labels. This feature is not the only distinguishing feature though.Whats inside the google coop seems to be different.

Clearly google customized search seems to be a way to overcome competition from tagging services. You can not only search the sites you have bookmarked but also those which are present on google. (Subscribe to your search engine)You can do that by clicking on add my expertise to your search. Is this an example of "Evil", thats debatable. However, it is fact that you cannot add your delicious bookmarks to your google as a third party tool directly.

My definition of "Evil-Everything voned is legal", Eg:Microsoft provides operating system--everything produced by microsoft is accepted as legal(not a virus, trojan etc..). Everybody else has to get separate certification..So is this..google has a search engine thats most popular..if you want to add third party tools you have to provide it separately, you cant add it to google directly. On the other hand you can very easily add modules to google homepage.

Add to google?

If you are using the google homepage for keeping your stuff you can add this module or gadget to your homepage by clicking on the add to google button . If you want to code for the module.I added it on a page at cse search.Some good search results are also link logged on the page inside the module. Apart from this you can add a custom search engine to your google search results by subscribing to a search engine. You can subscribe to the coop search using the subscription page at google. For subscribing to a google account you need a google account.

Plasma TV custom search

Search engine Topics:Plasma TV custom search

Contribution:No explicit declaration (Try their google Custom search engine page Plasma TV Finder)

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting:The search refinements of this search engine offer something new. The search engine provides a few basic search refinments like Reviews Compare > Plasma vs. LCD,
Forums, Plasma TV Problems, Buying Guides, Plasma TV Technology Scoop. But it does not stop at that. It provides some sub-refinements as well under the headings such as , , . Each of these provide a multitude of further refinements.

They claim "This search engine is dedicated to Plasma TV technology and is designed to help you quickly locate relevant information and find the perfect TV for you purposes. Our search engine will only display information based on the refinement key topics you select. If we are unable to find information for a given topic from our listed indexes we will search the web for your request."

Hopefully they will do something with the resolution of the results page--resizing of page. Moreover they have huge whitespace at the end of the results. Google has fixed this problem and put up the solution to the extra white space after search results.

Try the query "HDTV" in Plasma TV custom search and compare it with Google.Find it faster with webperc..

Try it:Plasma TV Search

Free TV Search

Search engine Topics:Free Tv Search(free to watch)

Contribution:No explicit declaration

Results hosted at:Own site

What's Interesting: FreeTvSearch.com allows you to search for tv shows online that you can watch for free right on your browser. Try the query "Simpsons" in Free TV search engine and compare it with Google.

It shows text based results. They could provide an option to use Snap.And they dont seem to believe in Search result refinements. There is a list of "Fav5 = Southpark, Family Guy, American Dad, Simpsons, Futurama". It would serve better if these were linked to results-"Instant search" or in my language "Link logged"

They show a list of sites that are being searched. This is a new trend with CSE's or custom search engines. It is somewhat similar to the tagging service in that a list is displayed with links to these sites.

Try it:Free TV Search

Moop Search-the meta coop search engine

When i first came up with the idea of Coop search it was as a "Search engine search". The idea was to fetch results from other customized search engines. This would be a meta a search engine. Google provides an option to subscribe to search engines, but it would be impossible to subscribe to all the "good" custom search engines.

You could subscribe to some of the search engines, you like the most but that would be limited in scope. So why not have a Moop search?


There are many reasons for that--that would mean that a scheme to choose the best results from the best search engines would have to be evolved. How effective this scheme or algorithm would be is difficul to acess. The choice to choose the search engine would be lost!!

Then again the description of each search engine could be provided along with the top result from each of the search engines. I plan to do that sometime. But that would involve the development of a scoring scheme and selection algortihm for the meta coop search engine.

If you want to add all the search engines as subscribed in your CSE, you could do that, but how effective would the scoring scheme be?