Part II

In the second installment of our series on what NOT to do in terms SEO and online, we’ll explore some other technical elements you should shy away from.

Doing any of the following could result in a penalty from Google. While some of these tactics are difficult for their computers to spot, a careful review by a real person will make these things apparent to Google.

If they catch you, you could be in a lot of trouble with your website. Recovering from these penalties takes a lot of time and effort – time and effort you could spend further developing your site’s resources.

1. Creating doorway pages

Another tactic used by aggressive SEOs is to create large numbers of pages whose only purpose is to rank well for as many keywords as possible. These pages are generally very low quality. Many of them are automatically generated by software programs designed to optimize pages around a specific long-tail keyword.

Two tools are generally used to create these pages.

One is a software program that copies or scrapes content from other web pages or RSS feeds. These pages are republished and link or re-direct visitors to main sales pages on the site.

The other tool is what’s known as Markov chain content generation. This tool uses special algorithms to combine words in unique ways. These pages generally escape many spam filters but read as complete Pig Latin to humans.

Here’s an example of Markov chain content generation:

A bowling ball daydreams, because a power drill eats the maelstrom about another polygon. Another highly paid spider buries the college-educated line dancer.

Whatever you do, do NOT use software to automatically generate content. While it’s fine to use content management systems and other software to MANAGE your site’s content, it should be created by real people.

2. Using Meta & JavaScript Redirects

If you’ve been surfing the net and noticed your browser loading a different page, sometimes on completely different sites, you’ve been redirected. The process generally only takes a split second and is hardly noticeable by site visitors.

Redirects are in fact common, and okay, if they’re used to guide visitors to the most up-to-date content on your site. We use 301 redirects all the time to funnel visitors to the most relevant pages.

This is a little different and if used improperly, could land you in hot water.

What search marketers do is build a keyword-rich page designed to rank the site high in the search engines. However, the redirect will send the visitor to a page more suitable for real people.

Two ways search marketers use redirects for nefarious purposes include the meta refresh and JavaScript.

Meta refresh is a section in the HTML code that causes the browser to redirect the visitor to the desired page. See below:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”1”; url=index.html”>

The “content=1” section indicates the number of seconds the keyword-rich page will display before the visitor is redirected. Search marketers do this in the hopes Google will index the keyword laden page.

JavaScript, the other tactic, redirects visitors to the right page but leaves Google to index the shadow one since they cannot handle JavaScript. Therefore, search engines ignore the redirect and index the keyword-rich page.

While redirects do serve an important and legitimate purpose, we recommend you avoid meta redirects and JavaScript. Use a 301 redirect if you’re updating your site’s pages and content.

3. Not having unique content

Many ecommerce sites around the Internet use product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or someone else. It’s likely several sites contain the same exact language.

While duplicating product descriptions isn’t considered spam by Google and others, it will result in your pages being removed.

In light of this, you should consider this to be spam.

Therefore, if you’re an affiliate or reselling products, you should add value and unique content to product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or seller. One way to do this effectively is to create comparison charts for your products for example.

But if you don’t do anything and simply cut & paste product descriptions from elsewhere, there will be no way to differentiate your site from the hundreds of others using the same text. You also run the risk of being buried or de-listed on the search engines.

4. Using IP delivery – or what’s known as cloaking

Most commonly referred to as cloaking, IP Delivery is perhaps one of the most controversial and complex SEO strategies. What it basically does a serve one site to the real visitor while showing a different page to search engine spiders. Search engines don’t like this at all and will penalize (…smaller) sites for engaging in cloaking.

What cloaking basically does is detect the IP address the visitor is coming from. If the IP address isn’t assigned to a search engine spider, the site will assume the visitor is human and give them that version of the page. If it’s determined the IP address is from a search engine spider, the other version is shown.

But while we do say cloaking is bad, there are a few instances where it’s okay. Web pages built using Macromedia Flash is one example. Since search engines don’t index Flash content very well, a SEO might ‘cloak’ the Flash page in order to give the spider meaningful content to index.

In this sense, cloaking is okay but is ripe for exploitation, which is what the controversy boils down to.

Google engages in this practice to an extent so in one sense, they’re okay with it. Let’s say you’re in Florida looking for a tire shop. If you go type-in ‘tire shops’ in a Google search, you’re likely to see all the shops in your area. They do this by identifying where your IP address is based.

So obviously, Google thinks IP delivery is okay is some extent.

Plenty of brand names, including Google, use cloaking with impunity. Since Google trusts these names, they turn a blind eye to cloaking. But smaller, less known names engage in cloaking all of the time and get penalized.

That’s what it all boils down to – whether your site is known and trusted or not.

The only instance where cloaking is accepted for sure is Google’s First Click Free program, which enables password-protected subscription sites to be indexed while only allowing a visitor to see a single page of content.  By nature, you have to use cloaking with these kinds sites.

So unless you’re a well known brand that Google trusts to use cloaking (…I mean IP Delivery) in the right ways or are a subscription based site, you should consider this an unsafe SEO strategy.

These practices mentioned here and in part I of our series on SEO tricks should be avoided altogether really.

Although you may think you can get around the search engine spiders, a manual review by a real person at the search engine will certainly yield these tactics and result in a penalty.

So play it safe and stick with the basics. While it may seem daunting at first, the benefits will be much better and sustainable.

Have you used any of these tactics to rank high in the search engines?

If so, what was your experience? Were you penalized? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.