Sometimes when I’m doing a google search, when I get down to the last few pages (obviously, not when there are 3 million hits, but only when there are a few hundred) the last few websites that show up have strings of nonsense words with my search term mixed in.
Like maybe I’m searching for the phrase “black handled scissors.” The last few (least relevant) sites will have a string of words like
pancake, water, alfalfa, black handled scissors, transmission, Angelina Jolie
They’re trying to game the search engines. All the words on a site go into the index and when a word is searched it’s hoped that the site is near the top.
The trick is that engines like Google detect this and use different criteria in ranking the results.
To some extent it’s a throwback to earlier days when the search engines were not as sophisticated.
