continued from Page 3

The best answer is A. Checking the site on a spider emulator (a tool that shows you how the search engines interpret a website) or looking at the source code are both good ideas – both approaches would give you some ideas about what Google sees.  But the source code can give you more detailed information about how the site was built. As for calling your friend: There’s no doubt the text is spam, but until you know where it’s coming from, you don’t know enough to accuse anyone of anything!

Looking in the source code for the home page, you find nothing that matches the text you’re seeing in the Google snippet.  In fact, looking through the source for the whole site, you see nothing amiss. 

You already know your friend isn’t a spammer, and it’s now clear that her web developer is squeaky clean, too. But if Google is returning a spammy listing, it had to get the spam from somewhere.

You need to know more about why Google thinks this text is coming from the site. How do you proceed? (Click on your answer to move to the next step.)

1. Search Google for all the URLs indexed from this website.
2. Search the other search engines to see how they’ve indexed the home page.
3. Send an email to Matt Cutts, Google’s celebrity engineer.

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posted 7/11/2006

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