can you do this

[tarant@bellatlantic.]

lets say you are ruuning an auction site for toys -and you want to attract people to your site--------------i know this sounds umprofessonal--------but could you put in your tittle and or keywords EBAY toys?


is this a violation of the policies of search engines

[Phoenix]

Would it be wrong for Sprint to have "Verizon" as a keyword? For Nestle to have "Hershey" as a keyword? For eBay to list the name of your auction site as a keyword?

Go with your instincts, if it feels wrong, it is wrong. SEs will look at context and if the keywords aren't applicable to your site, you could be penalized. Ask yourself, who would benefit from this, you or your visitors? If the clear answer isn't "your visitors", don't do it. BTW, in a search for the term "eBay" on Google, I got "Results 1 - 10 of about 12,400,000", with so many listings I doubt adding this to your keywords would really help anyway.

MB

[scottiecl]

Just putting Ebay in the title and meta keyword tag won't have much effect anyway- except to look silly to users. If you plan to put the word Ebay throughout your site, it might influence the SERP but why bother? Your user will be totally confused.

Focus on making the best possible site for the USER. You can buy an AdWords campaign to drive more traffic with "online auction" or other key terms that will drive traffic until your page climbs in the SERPS.

Better to do it right the first time than waste time trying to trick the SE into displaying your listing. Read this thread for a link to a great article about how Google hates trickery:

http://www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6085