March 23, 2000

Helping Webmasters Land in Search Engines' Nets

By ELIZABETH STONE

n some fronts, the battle for the Internet seems to have cooled. The fight between Netscape and Microsoft is in the hands of the courts. Microsoft's investment in Apple has temporarily imposed a truce in the hostilities between those two companies. And AOL seems to be getting along with everyone, or at least everyone it has taken over.

	Angel Franco/The New York Times
	Danny Sullivan, above, recently gave Web designers advice on how to make search engines include their sites.

A fight that keeps heating up is the one between search engines and Web designers. The people behind search engines decide which sites get listed and in what order, and they are continually readjusting the code that determines those rankings. In response, Web designers try to outwit the search engines by continually reconfiguring their own code to produce better results for their sites -- and sometimes resorting to dirty tricks. .

Many people refer to this ongoing contest as an arms race, with growing arsenals on both sides.

The stakes are high. The consensus is that most users of search engines do not look beyond the first 10 or 15 returned sites, if that, so Web designers scramble for position.

In turn, those Web designers and the people who hire them say they are frustrated by the search engines, uncertain of the criteria that underlie the rankings and frustrated that their sites can be eliminated from a search engine's database without explanation and often without recourse.

In search of some kind of mutual accommodation, more than 300 designers and marketers from all over the country gathered at the New York Hilton on March 9 for a one-day conference on the ins, outs and secrets of search engines and to meet some of the people behind the engines. The conference was organized and moderated by Danny Sullivan, a former Web designer and the creator of the e-mail newsletter Search Engine Report.

Mr. Sullivan, 34, is seen by both the Web designers who attended the conference and the search engine people who sponsored it as the best hope for an easing of tension.

Although frequently called a search engine "guru," Mr. Sullivan looked more like an affable Eagle Scout as he welcomed the crowd before him.

For Web sites, inclusion in the search results of popular engines can be a matter of survival.

Mr. Sullivan later compared the conference to a large Alcoholics Anonymous meeting because it had drawn in those who, until then, had thought that they were alone in their frustration.

He said that his target audience "is the one who feels lost and voiceless," although not penniless, since the day cost each participant $800.

In the old days, three or four years ago, all a Web designer had to do to get a site listed with a search engine was build one.

"Those days are gone," Mr. Sullivan told the group. That is familiar news to Web designers, who have grown accustomed to long, frustrating waits as search engines decide their fates.

Mr. Sullivan told the designers at the conference that although they could reduce the waiting time, jumping the line does not come cheap. For $199, a Web site can get a quick answer from Yahoo and LookSmart. Or it can buy a ranking at GoTo.com, AskJeeves.com and several other engines.

But what if something happens and a search engine eliminates your site? "Pray," Mr. Sullivan said. "Or write.

Maybe they'll give you a second chance."

The biggest news -- which Mr. Sullivan called "the new nuclear bomb" of the search engine world -- was that if a site is linked to by sites of high quality and popularity, those links can raise the ranking of the first site.

Mr. Sullivan also confirmed that there were several companies -- he refrained from identifying them -- that for a price will create "phantom sites," tricking the search engines into believing that a site has more sites linking to it than it actually does.

By morning's end, even an Internet veteran like Kelly Blazes, an online marketing consultant for PoliticalWag.com and other sites, had learned something.

"I didn't know that the number of sites that pointed to your site made such a difference," she said.

When Mr. Sullivan was a Web designer, he himself was baffled by the idiosyncrasies of search engines, he said.

How could a page that ranked above his competitors in one search engine rank below it in another and not appear at all in a third?

In 1995, he started to tinker with the placement of words in metatags (coding on Web sites that is invisible to readers), and he found that his alterations made a difference in his page's ranking.

Mr. Sullivan, who is also a former reporter for The Los Angeles Times and for The Orange County Register, wanted to share what he had learned.

"From the search engine's point of view, the more they define the rules, the more people push right up against them, and beyond," he said in an interview. "But from the Webmasters' point of view, how do they know if they've crossed the line?"

By late afternoon, it was time for the discussion that Mr. Sullivan said made him nervous: a panel of the designers and executives from Netscape, Snap, AskJeeves, Lycos and other search engines, bunkered behind the head table, in front of a collection of Web site creators and proprietors.

Soon into the session, someone posed the question on everyone's mind: "If someone's been blacklisted, can they find out?"

The answer was not comforting. "It lasts forever, and we won't tell you," said Chris Tolles, director of marketing for Netscape's Open Directory.

"It's very, very bad. If someone's truly tried to spam us, they're a really, really bad person."

Stephen Elliott, director of emerging technology for the online marketing company ROI Direct.com, disagreed.

"Spamming doesn't make you a bad person," he said. "Spamming makes you a stupid person.

"You make the big gains by walking as close as you can to the edge without breaking the rules."

Eventually, Mr. Tolles retreated somewhat from his position, telling a story about a merchant who claimed to have been led astray by a Web designer who performed some dirty tricks on the site's behalf.

"He called and said: 'I fired the guy. Can I get back in your directory now?' "

At the end of the session, the room filled with sustained applause. Mr. Sullivan applauded, too. It was the only such outpouring the entire day, perhaps the first hint of possible conciliation.