Protect Your Site Reputation: Avoid these Unethical SEO Tactics
The search engine ranking game is full of pirates and marauders; sort of like the high seas of the 18th century. In order to navigate through these treacherous waters (and protect the good name of links to and from your clients’ and your websites), it pays to understand your enemy.
This article provides a short overview of the downside of search engine optimization as well as offers tricks and tips of how to ensure that your websites legally reach the page rank they deserve so you can attract clients.
What is Search Engine Optimization & Why Should I Worry?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a necessary part of developing and maintaining a website. SEO centers around ensuring that the reputation of your site is measured accurately by the major search engines, and specifically by Google. Google determines where a website (and its individual pages) appears in a search for a specific keyword term by its “PageRank.”
PageRank is a trademarked mathematical algorithm developed by Larry Page, founder of Google. It takes into account the importance of sites that cite your website’s links as well as how many external links from other important sites you reference; combines these measurements with how links are worded as well as where the links occur, and comes up with a numerical ranking of how your site measures up to others within its keyword targets. The other large search engines, such as Yahoo!, Alta Vista, and Lycos use similar algorithms to measure the popularity and importance of a website.
The Google Technology Page has this to say about the importance of PageRank:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
Tip: You can see the results of your PageRank if you use the Google Toolbar. Google offers a snapshot of PageRank that can be viewed by choosing the PageRank button. You’ll see a small horizontal chart with a radio of your site’s rank versus the highest possible rank of 10. Most websites that serve as brochure sites are considered well-optimized if they reach a page rank of 5.
The secret of Google’s algorithm is that it is totally subjective, meaning it is based on the quality of links to and links from your site. The page rank of the site citing your site has just as much value as your site and you have no control over this vote of confidence.
If you wish your website to appear in the first page of a search, you have to pay attention to the quality of the hypertext links on your site.
Good and Bad Links
Google’s Webmaster Tools page has the best description of a good strategy to ensure your website gains a high PageRank:
The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?
What types of links should you avoid?
The term “Google Bomb” was added to the New Oxford Dictionary in 2005 to define the act of rigging the PageRank of a site by linking to pages that use a specific link anchor (the words used to identify a hypertext link that might lead to an innocent website having nothing to do with the anchor term), in the case of the first Google Bomb the term was “miserable failure” when referring to George W. Bush sites. A good article explaining the political ramifications of Google Bombing is provided by the BBC here. Google bombing is similar to another practice that is considered dishonest called “spamdexing.” Spamdexing is the practice of manipulating HTML pages with spurious keywords that mislead search engines with the hopes of affecting the category or PageRank of a site.
Try to also avoid dangling links by checking the health of any site to which you link. The Internet is ephemeral and sites come and go. The last think you want is to link to a dead page and cause your visitor to come upon the dread 404 page. Google has added mathematical values to its PageRank algorithm to combat these practices.
More About Spamdexing
- Spamdexing or Search Engine Spam is a series of dishonest practices used to influence PageRank for a website. Spamdexing should be avoided, including the following methods:
- Keyword Stuffing: Web crawlers are search engine scripts that index websites throughout the Internet for the various search engines. Keyword stuffing occurs when you strategically place hidden keywords around your web page to increase the PageRank whether they have anything to do with your site’s subject or not.
- Hidden or Invisible Text: You can hide keywords or phrases on the site by making their font the same color as the background, placing them in ALT tags, zero-width DIVs, no-script, or within no-frame sections. Hiding text should not be confused with accessibility efforts.
- Creating Gateway Pages: these are web pages containing little or no content but a large number of links with similar anchor terms. The sole purpose of such pages is to achieve a high PageRank as a gateway to the real website.
- Scraper Sites: Made for Google AdSense sites consisting of numerous Google AdSense listings along with the results of software applications that have “scraped” search engine result pages to create instant content without the permission of the parent site. These sites often contain extensive “Pay-per-click” advertisements and links that re-direct visitors to pornographic or spam sites.
More About Link Spam
Link spam are web pages containing links created for reasons other than the merit of the lined site. Link spam consists of such practices as building Link Farms, which are tightly integrated web pages that reference each other and appear to search engines as independent references. Use of the “Sybil Attack” is also highly dishonest and consists of the creation of domain names that all link to a single true site that may even be similar in name to a true site, but consist of either spam or pornography. Splogs are spam blogs, fake blogs used by spammers and containing little or no content but extensive advertising or pornography.
Page Hijacking is another form of spamming whereby a spammer creates a page extremely similar to an existing highly popular web page with a very close domain name. Web crawlers can tell the difference, but web surfers are taken to a possibly malicious and certainly meaningless site.
So, What Can You Do?
- Make sure that Google can index your entire site by adding a small text file named Robot.txt to your root directory. Add a tag in your home page to instruct Google to INDEX, FOLLOW, meaning index not only the first page, but all the pages of your site. You can use this free robot.txt file generator to create the file.
- Make sure your register your site map with Google on its Webmaster Tools home page. Then, verify your sitemap by copying and pasting the supplied meta-tag into your index page. The sitemap speeds up Google’s search.
- Make sure that you have at least one <H1></H1> HTML tag on every page of your site that delineates the title of the page for search engines. Secondary paragraph headings should be tagged within the HTML as <H2></H2>. Make sure that even Flash-based websites have hidden HTML with this structure that can be searched. It is a good practice for accessibility to prepare a hidden HTML page for your Flash pages.
- Try not to build websites using nested tables because search engines cannot index the contents of tables reliably. Tableless CSS has been developed to speed the indexing of websites (as well as to simplify and organize the structure of websites).
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Leave a Comment
Glad to read this post as soon as I woke up. There is nothing far better than having a good SEO plan for your website. From the 4 points you mentioned, I do follow all and feel Proud to do so.
I’m so glad that I am able to hold on to these gold nuggets
“PageRank is a trademarked mathematical algorithm developed by Nicolas Page, founder of Google.”
Where did you come up with Nicolas Page?
The co-founder of Goolge and creator of PageRank is Larry Page.
Matt, thanks for the correction. It was a Freudian finger slip. I’ll correct that in the article.
Which Nicolas Cage movie were you watching while writing the article?
I must have been channeling National Treasure… but I’ve never seen any Nicolas Cage movie except Moon Struck. lol
So many simple things to keep a site healthy and happy with the internet search community. As everyone is saying these days, focus on your content and a healthy human viable site. Then go and massage things like anchortext and webringing your site later.
If it doesn’t pass the first test though being viable for search engines is your last problem.
You can also get your pagerank from this site if you don’t want to install Google Toolbar:
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
Andy, I’ve been reading a lot about SEO strategies lately and you are so right. This article came from my discovery that as you say, the best SEO strategy is to make sure your site is readable by search engines and make it the best content-filled and easy to use site on the net.
I just get tired of clients saying part of the job spec is to get them a high page rank and I keep telling them there is no trick for this except to be so good you get noticed by reputable sites who then link. Client education to recover from the over hyping of SEO is what I am trying to batte.
This is a great article and was timed well too. I”ve been researching, whenever I find the chance, to find out more about SEO because it is such a complex but crucial part of a web designer’s career and the more you can do on your own, the more money you can save.
I will admit there are many tips in here I did not know. I had once read on a few sites that ALT tags with keywords actually helped your site but i’m glad to have been proven wrong early before I got too consumed in that practice.
I’ve also found it interesting that nested tables don’t show up in SEO as well as CSS sites. I always had read that this was the case and i’m glad to see it reassured here.
The sitemap is a great tip because i’ve recently started adding a sitemap to a variety of sites I work on and they’ve all shown increased search engine results. Some going from not even being present in the first 15-20 pages to being within the first 2 pages so that is great advice.
I can definitely say I will be taking all of this tips into effect on my next several designs and see how results change and of course i’ll be avoiding any of the unethical techniques, although I can say I haven’t done any of those (except the alt tag error).
Thanks for the great morning read!
Thanks! you made my day with your comments.
I did want to add that DO fill in those tags and tags because they assist folks with accessibility issues in identifying the subject matter of images that are not visible in such things as Readers for the Blind. Section 508 Compliance is very important to ensure your site is legible to all people.
But you are right that the ALT and TITLE tags have less to do with search engine optimization (although TITLE is looked for during an indexing operation).
So I bought the Envato, Rockable Press book, “How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer” a few months ago, and I can’t help but wonder if the method they instruct for hiding the text in the logo div is keyword stuffing or not? I know it is directly related to the content on the website, but the above article defines keyword stuffing as:
“Keyword stuffing occurs when you strategically place hidden keywords around your web page to increase the PageRank whether they have anything to do with your site’s subject or not.”
So is that ethical practice?
I think if you are hiding a keyword under an image div to alert someone who has turned off images that the logo is there, then it is a legitimate use of a hidden keyword. If you are hiding the keyword to get extra mileage from the search engine spider, then it is questionable. One thing to note is that Google (and other search engines that rely on automated indexing of the web) have added algorithms to their engines to scope out ALT and META tags that seem out of place or redundant, so keyword stuffing is not as prevalent as it used to be.
There are lots of SEO specialists who still rely on keyword stuffing (or call it Section 508 compliance for search engines) as a way to try to get around the heavy reliance on feedback via links into and out of your site for page rank. I think it is a waste of time. Ethical? sort of a gray area.
Thanks for an informative article, Rita. I’m not tech savvy enough to understand it all, though I’m pretty confident that the webmaster who set up our site followed all of your suggestions. We got a Google ranking of 3 a week after we launched late last November, so he must have done something right.
We no longer work with a webmaster, as WordPress (once set up) is pretty easy for me to handle alone. But he did give me some advice that seems to be working; we’re now a 4. (Not bad for an all-volunteer, super-low-budget site — or so I tell myself.)
One helpful tip he gave that I have been following as best I can is to include internal links from one page of our site to another. For example, when I have a story about organic foods, I will link within my site to the words “organic,” “agriculture,” “farmers,” or other related terms within the article. I’ll also link to previous articles, if they fit in the post. I am very careful not to skew my text just for the purpose of a link, however. If it’s simply a matter of choosing one synonym over another, I’ll use the one that provides a link; but if I have to change the meaning of a sentence to get a link, I won’t do it. I try not to overload my posts with internal links, but prefer to have roughly one per paragraph, if I can do it without looking phony.
Do you agree that this internal-links strategy is helpful, or am I deluding myself?
Also, I try to link to other, external sites that are mentioned in my articles, when appropriate to do so. I’m not sure what effect that has on my ranking, but I see it as a service to our readers.
Another thing my webmaster said is to write headlines so they come up on the search engines. My background as a writer/editor leads me to want to be creative and interesting, but he said that’s not good for Google rankings. He told me to put the most relevant term as close to the beginning of the headline as possible (“Ecotourism – Leave Nothing but Footprints and Goodwill”; “Environmental Working Group Gets ‘Feisty’ about Chemical Pollution”; The Repurposed Home Takes Curb-Shopping to a Fine Art”).
I also learned, from another website, that using a colon in a headline stops the webcrawler in its tracks. Instead (though the editor in me hates this), I use a dash (see “Ecotourism” headline above).
Finally, I had no idea that subheads within a post are scanned differently than general text. Thank you for that! I’ll be much more careful about the words I use there.
The internal links strategy is crucial to hold together a website and give your readers other ways to navigate should they wish to find out something while reading. It’s great SEO practice, too.
I’m going to be a radical here and disagree with the SEO specialists. Like teachers teaching to the test who miss teaching the nuances and depth of their subject, writing to the search engine takes away your strengths as a writer: to communicate an idea. So, I would let Google do its thing and you keep on being creating and clever in your headings. I don’t think that placing keywords inside the headers does much to aid you in furthering your page rank since Google measures links in and links out more than it measures internal keywords.
Just my point of view.
One of the ways I like to think of SEO is that Google and other major search engines are trying to be helpful to its users. Providing the best and most relevant results to your search. Think about when you “google” something– you want the best results possible that fit your search criteria. Not some site that TELLS you what the webmaster thinks its all about– You’re looking for honest, relevant content.
So I keep this in mind with my SEO. Your own keywords will come out naturally in the content of your site, and those keywords are all relevant to your overall site subject matter. At the end of the day, isn’t that what you’re searching for on Google anyway?
WOW. That is definitely the most useful article I have read! Had a lot of things about keyword spamming I didn’t know. I will be forwarding this link to my friends, it is very helpful. thanks a lot!!
But there is one thing I didnt quiet understand. You said its a good idea to “verify your sitemap by copying and pasting the supplied meta-tag into your index page.”
What do you mean by that? Where do I paste this?? Can you explain further?
Thanks
Hi, I replied to your question below, but the short version is that Google Webmaster Tools has a place where in two steps you can register a site map:
1. Register your site by entering it in a text box on Google Webmaster Tools. Then, copy the META phrase provided by Google into your index page. Click verify.
2. Once your site is verified as existing (it is almost instantaneous), you’ll be given a new text box to register your sitemap. Copy the portion of the URL of your site map that appears after your domain name. Click verify.
Voila.
What a great article and at a good time too. We have been focusing a lot on SEO at work and how to implement it into both our current and future sites. This article had a wealth of information and I agree whole-heartedly with you on the importance of content. That has always been our main focus, the quality of the content. I’ve been reading the book “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug and here’s what he says about content, “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.”
Thanks again for the great article. I’ll be sure to share it with my team.
Steve Krug’s book is my “bible”. It is full of practical usability information that I try to stress with my clients (not always successfully). Less is more on a website and pictures are everything. I love that book.
Very insightful – many thanks!
This is a valuable resource for me especially that I am planning to build my own blog
How do search engines ‘ban’ a site? Does that mean that links on it stop working or they just avoind showing its name on the search engines’ listing?
Search engines know the IP address of a site and if the contents of a site is misbehaving — spamming and setting itself up as a scrapper, etc. The search engine can ban the IP address from being displayed or indexed. It will simply ignore the site.
Great resource and very concise. I am learning more and more about SEO and there are just so many tips and tricks, but the best seems to be just bringing on quality content to get noticed. Just as with any product.
Isn’t it robotS.txt with an S??
Yes, thanks. slip of the fingers. robots.txt. In Joomla! the file already exists so I’m not used to creating it.
There were some questions in the comments that I want to address.
1. Register Your Site With Google: Google provides a series of tools to optimize your site to ensure that Google’s index covers the entire site. One of the strongest tools is the verification that your site map is registered on Google (thus allowing the spider quicker access to the entire site). To register your site map, go to Google Webmaster Tools and click Add A Site. In the drop-down text box, type the URL of the site you wish to register. You’ll be taken to a new page where Google will provide two methods of registration: paste a meta tag into your heading area of your index page. The meta tag looks like this: meta name=”verify-v1″ content=”LQu2gT8k9nGXCCQ2USGmCWA/I28raYLWu4H5YrEKclc=” or create a text file with the meta information as its name and upload it to the root level of your server.
Get a Google Site Map: Once your site has been verified, you’ll see an initial index of your site. One of the sections on this page lists the URL for your sitemap. If you have not previously submitted a site map, click the More link and in the next screen, click the Add A Sitemap button. Copy the portion of URL for your sitemap after your domain name and paste that code in the resulting drop-down menu. Click Submit.
Oh, and yes, the file name for the Google robot file is “robots.txt”. Thanks!
Those are very good tips on what to avoid. There are many sites that utilize these offhanded shady tactics that lose out on rankings when it’s discovered.
Utilize a linking strategy that includes contextual linking whether you utilize this on blogs, forums, websites, directories, or whatever you choose keep it relevant to the context.
An effective SEO strategy is one that goes beyond great relevant content and lots of it which is certainly the best way to start. If you have no content then there is no need for SEO.
By all means avoid everything that you’ve been cautioned against and utilize the positive tips to help make a difference on your web property.
Thank you everyone for your wonderful additions and support. It means a lot.
Thank you for this article.
I have been researching the best SEO techniques for the last few months so appreciate your research in one digestible “chunk”.
Thanks for explaining Rita.
Apologies for this seemingly unrelated comment-
but why on the blog listing, does the photo for each post, link to itself?
doesnt it make more sense to link it to the full article as well?
Or is this a new SEO trick
Hi, you’ll have to take that up with Joel, the Managing Editor at freelanceswitch.com. The website blog is run on WordPress. That’s all I know as I’m just a blogger.
You here so much about SEO and the many different techniques available to successfully optimize a site. It’s nice to see an article that highlights the proper way to use SEO versus the wrong way to do it.
An eye opener article.
Very interesting. Thanks.
Shon, your philosophy is exactly how I handle SEO – let your site naturally express its purpose and information (natural keywording) and concentrate our efforts at SEO into making it easier for Google to scope out those keywords by enhancing its searchability (adding heading tags, tableless CSS, and metadata). Also, if you have the funds, Google Adwords lets you place the site on pages where your competitor’s search results appear – those are those ads that show on the right side of every Google search result page. Bid on the keywords that describe your site and you can place a short blurb about your site wherever that keyword is used. This is a very powerful SEO tool that does not spam your actual website with keywords.
Thanks for tips and ideas
Thanks for the advice. Good stuff!
Hi Rita
Thanks for your helpful and of course hopeful article!!
I’ve done some spamdexing jobs for one of my website pages and the page has gone from Google search results for 4 days. Now I clear the hidden keywords and try to optimize the the page texts and paragraphs within the TAG. Is there any hope in returning of the page to Google search results?
Thank you in advance.
I think you have to read Google’s discussions on their blog and documentation about how long they take to re-index a site that they pull from their webots. But I suspect it will take a while.
another great tutorial. This is one thing i want to know to have more clients and i dont want to rely on freelance website just to get clients. I just wanna know what tool im going to use to monitor my seo campaign? For example i want to know my rank for specific keyword. Thank you
hi sonnydesign
I recommend Google Analytics service which is online and requires your google account to sign in. It reports great statistics including one you want I mean your website rank for a specific keyword.
Follow the link:
https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/login?ctu=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fanalytics%2Fsettings%2F%3Fet%3Dreset%26hl%3Den
I think you will find “Nicolas Page” is actually “Larry Page”.
I’m using this service to monitor my website’s position – http://monitor.mazecore.com . They provide rank and uptime monitoring with alerts, but position monitoring on free account is enough for me. I recommend this service with free tariff for your website.
It seams the most useful way to optimize one’s site is to link within your own site. From what I read, this is legitimit as long as the content is relevant. True?
A example of this is here: http://www.rtdesigngroup.com/blog.html
Notice the Tag Cloud, with keywords that link to differant pages of the site. Is this legal? They are the number 1 on google in my town. :/
Josh, to tell you the truth, keywords are becoming less and less important in page ranking. Google is discontinuing using them in its algorithm and moving more to such measures as how fast a site loads, how good the links into and out of the site are (good as in highly ranked sites that link to your site and you linking to other highly ranked sites). Google is also continuing to measure the quality of the words used to hold the link as well as whether the Title Tag is well-written and meaningful. Placing important words that describe your site in the title tag work much better than internal links or keyword tags in raising the rank of a site and will become much more important as Google phases out meta-keywords.
Thanks for vital piece of information most of the new blogger do follow these mistake even i had done.
Hello dude,i likes A New site in truth a lot. do u have on suggestion being my site? thanks as Your New attention
Thanks for the very important information. Definitely opened up my eyes.
Hiding keywords by making the text match your background is very frowned upon. Search engines can easily find out if you’re doing it so it jeopardizes your site ranking considerably.
Thanks for the article. The many different opinions about SEO can be confusing, but the article explains the logic very good. I like that Google seems to moving in a good directions and give traffic to the sites that puts effort into their content.
One of my preferred people said, It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It’s our choices. Dumbledore