There's a lot of rubbish talked about "search engine optimisation" but Darren Yeats' account at Buzzle is apparently based on Google's US Patent Application 20050071741 (filed March 31, 2005) and therefore something of an inside story.
The basic rule remaims the same: develop a site with good content, then improve it. However, it seems Google is using a variety of ways to punish companies that take short-cuts, mainly because many of most of them are spammers.
Unfortunately, one major problem with Google remains: a lot of product search results are complete and utter crap.
Try, for example, searching for a sony tcs-580v. The first result is Dooyoo, which has a small pic but zero useful information. It can't even find a price. The second hit is Amazon, which says: "This item is currently not available".
After that you're into hits called Supplemental Results, which means they are even less use -- they're basically search engine spam, presumably generated on the fly to match whatever you've typed in. All these score more highly than a site that has at least a bare spec, here, which doesn't even make the top 50.
In sum, Google's results for this particular search are not just useless, they are worse than useless: you could waste hours trying to pick a link with any value. Nor is it a one-off. All you have to do is browse eBay, spot something cheap you might fancy, and paste the product designation into Google. Happens to me most days....
