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Dirty Deeds done Cheap. Tricking the search engines. Everyone wants to fool the search engines. And the search engines know it. That’s why search engine optimization is such a strange business — a hybrid of technology and industrial espionage, perhaps?. Tricking the Search Engines.
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Dirty Deeds done Cheap Tricking the search engines Everyone wants to fool the search engines. And the search engines know it. That’s why search engine optimization is such a strange business — a hybrid of technology and industrial espionage, perhaps?
Tricking the Search Engines • Deciding whether to trick • Many people have tried search engine tricks because they’ve invested a lot of money in Web sites that turn out to be invisible to the search engines. These folks can’t afford to abandon their sites and start again
Figuring out the tricks • The text on the page should be there for the benefit of the site visitor, not the search engines • The search engine designers want their programs to determine which pages are the most relevant for a particular search query • What the search engines don’t want is for you to show one version of a page to visitors and another version to the search engines because you feel that version is what the search engine will like most
Do these tricks work? • A search engine algorithm may discover your trickery, and your page or your entire site could be dropped from the search engine • A competitor might discover what you’re doing and report you to the search engines. Google has stated that it prefers to let its algorithms track down cheaters and uses reports of search engine spamming to tune these algorithms, but Google will take direct action in some cases
Bad Stuff • Keyword stacking and stuffing • Hiding (and shrinking) keywords • Placing the text inside <NOFRAMES> tags. Some designers do this even if the page isn’t a frame-definition document • Using hidden fields. Sometimes designers hide words in a form’s hidden field (<INPUT TYPE=”HIDDEN”>) • Using hidden layers. Style sheets can be used to position a text layer underneath the visible layer or outside the browser
Hiding • Using <NOSCRIPT> tags • Hiding links • Using unrelated keywords • Duplicating pages and sites • Page swapping and page jacking
Doorwayand Information Pages • Doorway pages are sometimes known as gateway pages and ghost pages. The idea is to create highly optimized pages that are picked up and indexed by the search engines and, hopefully, will rank well and thus channel traffic to the site.
Using Redirects and Cloaking • If a site has been built in a manner that makes it invisible to search engines, cloaking allows the site owner to deliver indexable pages to the search engines while retaining the original site. • The site may not have much textual content, making it a poor fit for the search engine algorithms • Each search engine prefers something slightly different
Understanding redirects • A redirect is the automatic loading of a page without user intervention. You click a link to load a Web page into your browser, and within seconds, the page you loaded disappears, and a new one appears. • By using the REFRESH meta tag. • By using JavaScript to automatically grab the next page within a split second • By using JavaScript that is tripped by a user action that is almost certain to happen
Examining cloaking • Cloaking is a more sophisticated trick than a redirect, and harder for the search engines to uncover than a basic REFRESH meta tag redirect. • Pages provided to the search engine: Often much simpler; created in a way to make them easy for the search engines to read; have lots of heavily keyword-laden text that would sound clumsy to a real person • Pages presented to visitors: Often much more attractive, graphic-heavy pages, with less text and more complicated structures and navigation systems
Paying the Ultimate Penalty • It is possible to get the ultimate penalty: having your entire site booted from the index. • Google at www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Steps if your site is banned • Clean away any dirty tricks from your site • E-mail help@google.com to explain that you fixed your site • Wait a couple of weeks and then try again • Still no reply? Try again after another couple of weeks • If you still can’t get a response, try calling 650-330-0100 and then pressing 0. • Ask the operator who you can talk to about the problem