[Web4lib] Google and meta keyword tags

[Thomas Dowling]

On 12/7/2006 3:47 PM, Drew, Bill wrote:

> So if I want a word like agriculture_database I need to have it out in
> the open and visible to who ever looks at the page?
> I would assume that putting such things in comments so they didn't
> display would be a bad thing to do as well.  
> 

I don't know that search engines ever indexed comments, but the same
idea applies.  Within the last year or so (IIRC), Googlebot changed from
a Lynx-based browser to a Gecko-based browser like Firefox and Mozilla.
 At the time, the assumption was that they were doing this to help them
detect tricks like white-on-white or black-on-black text, text set to
unreadably small font sizes, absolute positioning to place a block of
text far off-screen, etc.  They've all been employed to shovel keywords
into search engines.


Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu