DANGEROUS, UNETHICAL STRATEGIES THAT WILL GET YOUR SITE BLACKLISTED BY SEARCH ENGINES
LINK FARMS
Also known as Spamdexing or Spamdexing.
A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous
links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of
websites interlinking with each other.Such websites are considered illegal in
the eyes of Google and major search engines because they aim to achieve high
rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content
and overall quality. As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search
engine, is highly dangerous. Even if your website has great content, if you or your
SEO consultant use this technique, your website will still get penalized or
banned because the engines figure that if you did have good content you wouldn’t
resort to such sneaky tactics designed to trick them.
HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT
When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming
links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The
correct answer is that they will target specific, preexisting and established
websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without
having to link back to them).If a professional tells you that they will build you
hundreds or thousands of pages across different domains that will link to your
website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple your website.
Also periodically search your domain name in the major search
engines to see which sites are pointing to you. If you see anything out of the ordinary,
such as websites whose domains are extremely long or gibberish (lots of numbers
and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of
links, approach your SEO professional about getting your site removed from
these pages and find out how they appeared there in the first place.
DOORWAY PAGES
Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway
Pages, etc.
Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed solely
for the search engine and oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the human visitor.
These pages often use a redirect script that automatically points the visitor
to another page on the website without the human visitor ever seeing the
doorway page. This is also known as cloaking and is clearly defined as an illegal
practice by Google and other search
engines. The only time a landing page is acceptable by search
engines is if it is in the form of an informative, well written article that
human visitors read and enjoy, where they are not tricked into clicking or
being redirected to the website’s main pages.
HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT
Make sure you understand exactly what kind of pages are being
added to your website and be sure to look at most of them. Ask your SEO
professional point-blank whether any of these pages will automatically redirect
to your website’s main page. If they say yes, then they are breaking the rules
and are well aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT work with such an
individual or company.
It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or
other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is never the case
and though Google may not know about that particular trick yet, it will find
out fast enough and your site will get penalized as a result.
KEYWORD STUFFING
One of the original illegal SEO techniques, keyword stuffing
occurs when you load a webpage full of particular keywords, either in the meta
tags, other script tags, or in the content itself. This is different from
optimizing the page for particular keywords because the same words are being
repeated dozens or hundreds of times in no credible or informative way. Keywords
are hidden several ways, for instance
some people will make the text the same color as the background
so search engines see it, but no
human visitors can. Others will hide keywords in script tags.
Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords outside of your visible
screen area, again so that no human visitors can see it - but search engines
can. Though on the surface, using such techniques might sound like an
attractive idea. However, search engines can detect whether a keyword is being
used properly and will penalize or ban your site for using any of the above
techniques to stuff keywords into your site.
HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT
Often times, the only way you can know if your site has
been stuffed with keywords is to view the source code of your website (visit your
site in your favorite browser, click “View” and then “Source Code.” A page of HTML
will display. If you see the same keywords repeated hundreds of
times anywhere, then your page has been stuffed and will be considered
in violation of every search engine’s rules.
SCRAPER PAGES
Also known as Auto Generated Pages.
Scraper pages are those comprised of search results or content
automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search engine results.
This is a form of plagiarism as no part of the scraper page is original
content. Most often, such sites are used to display Google Adsense Ads or other
ads that pay the site owner every time a visitor clicks on it. However search engines
have gotten very good at banning such sites from their results and human
visitors can detect them easily as well. Scraper sites are easy to spot as they
are largely illogical. They are snippets of other webpage content, or search
results, and therefore have no sensible point and do not make sense when read.
HOW TO GUARD AGAINST IT
As with other illegal techniques, it’s important to
first ask your SEO professional directly whether they will employ such
unethical techniques. Then you must monitor their work. Make sure
you have access to your website’s hosting service so that you can view all pages
that are hosted on your site’s domain. Periodically view pages at random to be
sure they do not contain this or other illegal content. Also
get reports of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you
rank for. Click through from the
search results and check the landing page’s source code and
content for anything fishy or
inappropriate.
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