Poisoning the Keyword Databases for Self Promo

I just got an email from Andy Mindel of WordTracker, about the SEO software Matt Cutts thought was rubbish. Andy said the sales text was something likeso:

RankAttack technology does not submit your site to the search engines... rather it creates a persona of "popularity" around your site in the eyes of the search engines. The purpose in RankAttack technology is simple: get the search engines attention and make them want to list your website under the keywords you desire'

I can't see search term co-citation being a trusted source of data unless it is from well estabished search history accounts and/or there are also a number of news stories about the topic and/or new web pages on trusted sites about the topic.

If temporal effects of increased search volume are used to allow sites to gain link popularity at quicker rate then odds are pretty good search engines would also look at the number of news stories and unique sites posting about the topic.

I suppose you can write a number of press releases and the like, but it is going to be hard to get mainstream news coverage for most websites, and without it then I can't see any value in poisoning the keyword research tools in your keyword space (unless you are doing it to screw with competitors keyword research ability or marketing your site through spamming keyword suggestion tools - as many SEO companies have done).

Andy states that this type of search spam is poisoning the keyword databases, but WordTracker has worked hard to filter out most of it:

Unfortunately, this approach is skewing the popular keyword databases such as (our own) Wordtracker, KeywordDiscovery, Overture suggestion tool and the Google keyword tool.

However, we have improved our spam filter and 99% of these skewed terms have now been removed from the Wordtracker database.

Published: October 13, 2005 by Aaron Wall in seo tools

Comments

A Reader
October 13, 2005 - 7:39pm

Doesn't wordtracker use a few metas? Nothing major...why would this software hit anything but the big boys?

October 13, 2005 - 7:51pm

Yes Wordtracker does. I believe like Dogpile and metacrawler.

I think the software was wrote by someone who wanted to sell an SEO software product more than provide a useful service.

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