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8 SEO Tricks your Do NOT Want to Use – Avoiding the Google Penalty Box Part II

February 15, 2011 By admin

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.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

8 SEO Tricks your Do NOT Want to Use – Avoiding the Google Penalty Box

February 11, 2011 By admin

Part I

Anyone entering the world to search engine optimization certainly will learn pretty quickly about different neat tricks of the trade. Some of these practices are legitimate (…in the eyes of Google) and will not result in a penalty or outright ban from the search engines.

But others – known in the trade as ‘black hat’ – are questionable at best these days. Some of these practices were okay back in the 90’s when search engines were still in their infancy. Today they’re much more advanced though and can easily spot many of the practices I’ll outline below.

One thing you need to remember though – when we say search engines, we primarily mean Google. They capture over 2/3 of the Internet’s searches. When you’re optimizing a website for the search engines, you’re primarily working with Google from an SEO perspective.

Continue reading for 8 SEO tricks you want to avoid altogether. Doing so is your best insurance against being penalized by Google.

Because once you’re in that hole, it’s a real challenge to dig yourself out.

8 ‘Black Hat’ SEO practices you should avoid at all costs (1-4)

The practices described below are generally considered by Google to be ‘black hat.’ If they decide to manually review your site’s code and remove you from their listing, it can take a long time to recover. It’s best to avoid these practices involving keywords, links and other technical elements of your website.

1. Keyword stuffing – a practice that’s been around awhile

Keyword stuffing is perhaps the oldest trick in the book when it comes to SEO. Search engines loathe keyword stuffing and can absolutely detect it. Basically, keyword stuffing consists of repeating keywords over and over again. It usually appears at the bottom of a page in very small text.

If you’re trying to target the phrase ‘mountain vacations’, one common keyword stuffing move would look like this in your site’s code:

<h6>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</h6>

As you may or may not know, an <h6> heading makes text very tiny. Including this on the bottom of a webpage isn’t noticeable by people but is noticed by search engines. In the early days of SEO, this is how webmasters got their sites to the top of the search engines.

Keyword stuffing can also be done in meta-description, keyword and image ALT tags.

For ALT tags, say we have an image and include our keyword in the alt and title tags for the image. This is considered keyword stuffing by Google and will land you in trouble.

To see if any webpage has any of these elements, simply use the ‘Source Code’ feature on your browser.

While it’s possible to trick the search engines for awhile if you’re really experienced, they almost always detect keyword stuffing and act accordingly. Also, it’s possible competitors will file spam reports with Google so avoid keyword stuffing.

2. Invisible, barely visible or hidden text

A constant dilemma for search engine marketers is to develop web pages that appeal to both visitors and the search engines. The dilemma is the fact that search engines love simple pages with lots of content.

Real people like pages with animation, graphics and lots of special effects – the very same elements search engines cannot crawl and index.

One of the ways SEOs used to get around this was to create text that’s invisible or hidden. But with today’s more sophisticated search engines, this can be construed as keyword stuffing and get you in trouble.

One way webmasters would do this is to create text as the same, or near identical, color of the page’s background. Doing this in effect means the visitor won’t see any words but the search engines will find all of those keywords.

For example, you can have a white background <bgcolor=”#FFFFFF> with a text font of white <fontcolor=”FFFFFF”>. It’s also possible to use a slightly different text color by offsetting one of the colors a little bit. This will be a little harder for the spiders to detect but if Google manually reviews it, they will definitely catch it.

CSS is another creative way webmasters have adapted the hidden text strategy. They basically would use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to hide text from humans while making it available to search engines.

Below is an example of our keyword using a CSS visibility: hidden font format.

<div style=”visibility:hidden;”>mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations mountain vacations</div>

To see the text, someone will have to look at your page’s source code.

Human reviewers at Google do review sites so once they check yours out, they’ll certainly see you’ve done this if you have. There’s only one instance where it’s okay and that’s if you use CSS sheets that let you tab hidden and unhidden text. These kinds of things are common with product listings on ecommerce sites.

This is generally viewed to be okay we think but in order for that to be the case, the user must have the option to choose whether or not to view the text.

One more way to hide text using CSS sheets is to use layers and place text behind pictures or other objects on the page. Known as the z-index function, the webmaster would simply assign the viewable item a higher z-index number than the hidden text.

Next, they would use another CSS function called absolute positioning to position the text and image in the same exact location.

Again, this tactic is harder for a computer to detect but careful review by someone will certainly reveal it. It’s best to avoid this or any other tactics designed to hide text from visitors but make it viewable by the search engine spiders.

3. Selling links for the purpose of increasing a target URL’s PageRank

Another practice search engines frown profoundly on is selling links on your site. Paid links often look unnatural and if you see them, none of them have anything in common. Take the following example for instance, which you may have seen across the bottom of some web pages:

Mountain vacations – Plastic Surgeons in Florida – Buy Gold – Used Cars for Sale

As you can tell, none of these have anything to do with the other, which is a tell-tale sign of selling links. If the links are all for businesses located in the same town for example, then there’s no problem. But if a page has links going to an offshore gambling site, then there’s more risk of getting into trouble.

Using reciprocal link directories can also result in a penalty in some situations, especially if they have a wide focus of unrelated content.

Somewhat related to selling links is the risk for your site getting infected by Malware or being hacked. If you’ve setup your Google Webmaster’s Toolbox, then you should receive a warning from Google saying your site has been hacked or hosting Malware.

If you end up in Google’s penalty box for selling links, it can take some time and effort to get out. First you should remove the links and promise Google to never do it again. It usually takes 3 months or longer between the time they set your PageRank to zero and you get back in.

Many webmasters though find the profits too good to pass up despite the rigid warnings and penalties for selling links. Check out Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to learn more about their position on this topic.

4. Hidden Links and the Phantom Pixel

Another couple of practices involving links that Google really can’t stand and loves to penalize sites for are hidden links and what’s known as the phantom pixel.

Hidden links are basically links obscured from a visitor’s view that are strategically placed to direct the search engine to an unrelated site. The webmaster likely wants these off-topic sites to be indexed and rank well. Using hidden links boosts link juice (…or PageRank) on favored web pages.

Whether paid for or not, the point is the links are NOT there for the site visitor to find. Since they hold no value for the site visitor, Google and other search engines penalize sites that have them.

Techniques for hiding links are quite similar to invisible/semi-visible strategies for keywords. CSS layering like we discuss above is another strategy. Heck, you can even include links in the period at the end of a sentence. Even though the link is still technically invisible, search engines will still consider it a hidden link and act accordingly.

Phantom pixels are much like the invisible or hidden link in a period at the end of a sentence but instead the link is placed in a 1×1-pixel image. These images can also contain keywords in their alt tag like we talk about above but webmasters also use these super small images for hiding links.

Like other things we’ve talked about today, phantom pixels are another way for your site to be penalized or even banned – assuming Google discovers these ‘black hat’ tricks on your site.

And eventually you can assume you will be caught.

While the search engine spiders may not be able to catch everything, a manual review of your site’s source code certainly will…so take our word for it, be careful by not using any of these or the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks we’ll get into next time.

Check back with us late Monday to learn about the other 4 ‘black hat’ SEO tricks you should avoid like plague.

And if you’ve used any of these techniques, briefly tell us about your experience and how you dealt with any penalties.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

8 Ways you can safely sell Links on your Website

November 23, 2010 By admin

If you’ve had a blog for awhile, you may be getting inquiries from potential advertisers and others about paid links. It’s one benefit of building a blog for the long term – others will pay you for advertising links.

As you can imagine, this can become quite lucrative over time.

In many respects though, Google frowns upon this practice and penalizes sites it sees as unnaturally manipulating search results. What they do (as well as Bing) is use link-based analysis to determine the quality of a site and its relevance to the keyword in question. Google believes buying and selling links circumvents this process and makes results less relevant and helpful to its searchers.

However, if you read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will find that not all paid links violate their rules. In fact, if links are bought/sold for advertising purposes and not to pass on PageRank and manipulate search results, then it’s totally okay.

If you’re getting inquiries about advertising links, there are 8 ways you can safely sell links on your site without being penalized Google.

1. Add a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link

Adding this code into the link adds the link to your site but prevents your site from passing any “link juice” to the other site – basically it ensures the other site only receives traffic from the link and not a PageRank boost. This suggestion comes directly from Google so you can be 100% sure that it’s okay.

2. Only link to intermediate pages that include a robots.txt file

Robots.txt blocks search engine spiders from crawling a page. Most websites want their pages to be crawled. Therefore, you can redirect links to an intermediate page that includes this characteristic. Using an intermediate page strips the link of any PageRank benefits and ensures the link is for traffic only…this is another one of Google’s recommendations.

3. Avoid “link farm” schemes

Link farms are websites whose only purpose is to pass PageRank and link to other sites. While you probably would not use one, you need to be careful that your site doesn’t appear as one. Understandably, Google does not like link farm sites at all. In order to avoid looking like you’re a link farm site, embed links within relevant content and avoid having them all in one place.

4. Negotiate link sales for the long term

Consistent rotation of links is another red flag for the search engines as they make your site look like a link farm. Therefore, to fly under the radar, you should select paid links carefully and keep them consistent for as long as possible.

5. Don’t advertise that you’re selling links

This is advice that usually isn’t heeded online. If you advertise you’re selling links, you will get a lot of requests from spammers and banned sites. While the money may be tempting, be patient and wait for quality advertisers to come to you. This will give you better link partners and reduce your frustration.

6. Use HTML links only

Some link buyers may be using JavaScript or some other code in order to update or change the text and URL of the link at a future time. Avoid this by sticking with HTML based links.

7. Only link to relevant sites with quality content

Relevancy between links and keywords is the first thing search engines look for. Therefore, you should be sure that links you’re using point to quality content. Doing so helps search engines achieve their #1 goal, which is delivering the most relevant content to their users. In turn, they’ll reward you for it.

8. Be selective on who you partner with for links

Carefully evaluate sites before linking to them and ask yourself if you want your visitors going there. Do a site:yoursite.com search in Google on the company and see if they’ve had any penalties in the past that may hurt you if you partner with them.

One good rule of thumb when dealing with paid links – only deal with sites you would link to without payment. Doing so ensures you only sell links that are of use to your visitors. Selling links shouldn’t be your main source of income but they can provide a nice bonus.

Remember, Google frowns on selling links for PageRank and other purposes. However, you can do it safely by following the 8 steps mentioned above.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Site Architecture, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

5 Steps to Obtaining Organic Links through Blog Comments

October 14, 2010 By admin

Anyone who manages or owns a blog knows about comments and how many of them are simply spammers looking for links. After seeing so many “spammy” comments on your blog, it’s hard to imagine you can earn legitimate organic links from commenting on other people’s blog.

Well in fact, you can if you do it right.

If done properly, you’re really developing relationships with other bloggers rather than fishing for links. Over time, this is a way more beneficial and practical approach. Other bloggers will see you read their material and benefit from it and may even cite something you write in one of their posts, giving you another organic link right there.

So how do I gain organic links for my blog through blog comments? Continue reading for 5 steps you can use to do just that.

1. Read the entire post you’re commenting on

You wouldn’t think so but many blog comments have absolutely nothing to do with the material in the post…this is a red flag for a ‘spammy’ comment. Be sure and read the entire post before commenting and either have some constructive criticism or a question to ask.

2. Identify yourself

You will also want to include your name in the right field. Many spam links contain keywords the link builder is trying to get links for. If you must include keywords, be sure you have your name first.

3. Be friendly and personal

Another way to build organic links and build relationships is to be friendly and personal. Address the blogger by their first name and thank them for the good post…just a couple ways to be friendly

4. Contribute something valuable to the discussion

Don’t simply say “great post” or something like that. Add to the points they mention in their post or provide some constructive criticism or ask a question. If you disagree with their conclusions, respectfully state why…don’t be rude about it.

5. Come back again and keep in touch

Don’t simply leave a comment and never return. Check in often and comment when you have something to add. Consistent visits and comments help you build the relationship that will lead to a link. Be sure to subscribe to their comments so you can see if they reply to you or if someone has something to add to your comments.

Commenting on others’ blogs is a great way to network with like minded professionals and build your online presence.

Links signal to the search engines that your blog and website are important and view links as a vote of confidence from whoever is linking to you. The bigger the site linking to you, the bigger the impact it can have. But start small in the beginning and grow the quantity and quality of your links in tandem.

Filed Under: SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , ,

Build More Links to your Site by Syndicating Articles

September 1, 2010 By admin

Generating original articles for your site accomplishes several objectives – they build content on your site which boosts rankings, they provide a valuable resource for prospective customers and they attract incoming links, which helps your position in the search engines.

One way you can obtain incoming links for your site is to submit knowledge articles to other sites in exchange for a link back to your site. These “article submission” sites provide great resources on various topics in addition to helping you spread your name around.

If it’s done correctly, it is reasonable to expect you will get links to the exact pages you want that include the exact anchor-text you desire.

But submitting content to some of these article submission sites can also have some drawbacks – namely low quality links, duplicate content problems and drawing unwanted attention to your site’s search engine optimization efforts.

Google in fact frowns upon this and views it as an artificial link-building tactic.

There’s in fact a right way and a wrong way to build links through these article submission sites. Some of these sites are in fact duplicating content from your site so you need to be sure your stuff is tweaked to not trip the duplicate content alarm at Google.

You also don’t want to totally rely on these sites. The ones you do use should be reputable and professional. Sites who say “looking for writers” or “submit an article” are better options to choose that won’t paint a big target on your website.

Some popular article submission sites include: Ezine Articles, Article Dashboard, Buzzle, Article Alley and more.

Check back again soon for some more tips on how you should go about submitting articles to these submission sites along with some info on finding good ones to work with.

Filed Under: Copywriting/SEO Content Development, Online Marketing, SEO Technology, Tip of the Day Tagged With: , , , ,
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