Achieving top rankings in search engines by studying top ranking sites

If you haven't achieved top rankings in search engines, we strongly suggest looking at the Web sites that did achieve one of those rankings to try and understand why they rated so well. There is one catch you need to be aware of:

The site you are viewing may not be the site that achieved that top ranking. How can this be? Simply put, it's called the "ol' switcheroo." A clever marketer creates a Web page, usually all text with carefully constructed META tags, comment tags and body copy, and submits that page to a search engine.

If he's done a good job, voila, number one ranking. Now, the site that achieved such a high ranking is probably not very attractive - often, depending on the search engine, it contains just one word on the actual page, or one paragraph stuffed with keywords, repeated two or three times. Since it is so unattractive, the person who just achieved that ranking will switch out that one Web page and substitute their real site complete with graphics and the other trappings of good Web site design.

I do NOT recommend this technique. First, it is dishonest since the page a user searches for should be the page they get. Second, you'll get burned when the search engine periodically and without notice automatically re-indexes your site. When this happens, you'll immediately and without warning lose your ranking.

One of the first clues that this tactic is being used is that the site title and description displayed in the search summary results are not found anywhere on the actual Web site. Our point here is this: Before you begin to try and learn from the people who have Web sites in the top positions in a search engine, make sure the site you are looking at is the actual Web site that garnered that top ranking. If you suspect that a highly ranked site is employing the "ol' switcheroo" tactic, you can resubmit it to the search engine. When it gets re-indexed, it will likely lose its ranking.

This can help you learn from sites that honestly deserve their top position. There is just one occasion when re-indexing a site that shouldn't be at the top of a list won't work. Some really cunning Web site managers use a CGI script to automatically detect a particular search engine's spider and then dynamically serve a Web site front page that is different from the one that the rest of the world sees. This page will guarantee them that top rank even if it is an extremely ugly nonsense page. There is almost no certain way to tell if someone is using this technique.

However, there are the same hints as before (e. g., the words that make up the site description and title are not found on the actual page, and re-indexing the site doesn't cause a new headline and site description to be generated by the search engine). We don't
believe this is a very commonly used technique yet, since it's difficult and time-consuming to implement.

Make sure you are competing and positioning against a site that is in fact, the actual site that was indexed. If not, you can report your suspicion that they are using a CGI script to serve up a different page to search engines. If investigated, the site may be removed from the search engine database for displaying a page that doesn't match what they submitted.

As far as the legalities of submitting a page other than your own, most of the search engines themselves ask you to submit or suggest a favorite page from any site, not just your own. If the page has not changed since it was last indexed, their ranking should not change or be affected by the resubmission.