Being found

Search engine optimization

How to be found on the internet - Chapter 3. The traps - what not to do

What you must know!

A lot of SEO providers want to make you believe that they can immediately and guaranteed get you in the top ranking of the search engine results. One fine offer after another. With all kinds of tricks and aggresive marketing methods they try to take your company to a higher level. From portals and enormous ammount of automatically generated pages, with nonsense texts that serve no other purpose than scoring in the search records. Sometimes even making use of almost criminal practices.

Tricks of which repeatly becomes clear that they endanger your position and costing you lots of money. Your entry in the search engines can be removed and your domain name / URL placed on a blacklist. Consequense being that all work has been for nothing and you can start all over again.

Some of the used tricks.

I allready told you some of the tricks. Now it's time to enter the matter more thorough. If you keep in mind these tricks, picking a reliable optimizer becomes a lot more easy.

Nr. 1 Guaranteed

A lot of companies guarantee a number one position within a week with large search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Without the use of tricks, this is not possible.

Pay attention!

One of the tricks is optimizing a page with 'bogus' keywords. A keyword that's not, or hardly, used and which makes it quite easy to obtain a top 10 position.

With this you can imagine that, if the keyword is never, or hardly used, your visitor will not use it either.

Optimization succeeded and at the same time failed, because optimizing isn't just reaching a top position, no it's more, it's directly positioning your page to get your page enough visitors.

Submitting to thousands of search engines / directorys

I guess you know this one 'We will apply you with 100.000 linkpages, 1000 search engines and ...'.

Do you really believe that one can apply you with 100.000 linkpages in a decent fashion?

Do you really believe that there are more than a handful of important search engines?

How many do you know?

Does it all seem too good to be true and is your head spinning with these mentioned numbers?

Somewhere deep inside you a small alarm allready sounded. You just don't know exactly what it was. The small alarm should have been a huge cannon going off. You know, just as well as I do, that this kind of promises can't be made real.

You do realize that there are only a few really important search engines, and that applying to 10.000 pages is virtually impossible, at least not in a decent manner?

Then why do you consider taking them up on their offer?

Cloaking

'Cloaking' means hiding/hidden.

The visit to a page by a search robot, like Googles' for example, is recognizable. The instant the visit happens, the robot is presented with another page than you or I, the regular visitors of the page, see. This form of misleading is easily recognized by search engines and certainly not appreciated.

Doorway pages

The so called 'Doorwaypages' are pages that merely exist to lead visitors to another page by making use of commercial banners and links.

By making lots of those pages, mostly automated, one tries to get as many positions with as many keywords in the search results as possible.

All these pages then lead the visitor to an online-shop or customer page, that often has to pay per visitor.

Linkfarms

Linkfarming: The "farming" of links.

In 'Linkfarms' the website only exists to take on as many links to other pages as possible. These links, to each other, have no common ground or value.

Search engines, as Google, can recognize such websites and punish the websites added to these sites. For example, this can happen through a deduction on the Pagerank but also by excluding a domain.

If someone, out of the blue, offers you a link adding, please, watch out!

A site containing a lot of links does not always have to be a linkfarm. If the links are connected through subject or otherwise, nothings' the matter.

Dump domains

Mostly used to offer super optimized pages, through that they score highly and they appear in top of the search results.

Like the name says, these are domains that try to generate a lot of traffic (visitors) in a short period of time. Once recognized they are immediately removed from the database.

You yourself can recognize them by their bogus names or nonsense text in the link description.

Link text bombing

In Search engines, specially in Google, the number of links to a website are important to value this page. In this the text to a page link is also very important.

This can lead to, that when searching for a specific word, for example 'interior', the first result might be a page that has nothing to do with this word, and the word doesn't even appear in the text of this page. An explanation can be, that a lot of links were lead to this page, and they might contain the word 'interior' in the link text.

In the so called 'Bombing' this principle is exploited. Simply by placing lots of links to other pages with the wanted keyword, these pages will get a high ranking in the result list.

This phenomena is now known by the many links that referred to the site containing the biography of George W. Bush, the link text being:

»miserable failure«

Through this, the site showed up in first position in the search results. That the entire site didn't contain the words "miserable failure" is clear.

Hidden text

A much applied trick is hiding text. Preferably combined with word chains, a continuous repetition of keywords.

This can be done by colouring the text the same as the background of the page. You, the visitor, will not instantly see this text. A search engine robot cannot recognize text colour and therefore will see the text as part of the page. Most of the time you can recognize this type of misuse by the ammount of white space (often on the bottom) on the page.

This text will only be visible when you drag your mouse, left button pressed, accross the page, as if you were selecting text.

A look at the sourcecode of the page will also provide a clear view on these practices.

One of the variations, only recognizable in this manner, is hiding the text by CSS.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets, offers the opportunity to separate HTML coding from lay-out.

Through lay-out coding it also is possible to not display some fragments of the text on the screen, that are in the HTML-document.

Word chains

Like you can allready notice by this verb, in pages that use this, certain words are used one after the other to form a chain. They are repeated over and over again. Most of these words are popular phrases with which the mentioned pages want to be found.

Often easy to recognize by the description that is mentioned in the search results.

Sometimes used in combination with hidden text.

Header abuse

To emphasize parts of the text, to add value, you can use headers <h1> to <h6>.

The search engine robot will recognize these headers and will add more value to the containing text then to the rest of the text.

By adding lots of text to the headers or by adding lots of <h1> headers to a page, one tries to get higher in the results.

As soon as a search engine will notice this, it can happen that your page isn't found anymore, or maybe somewhere in the 1000 to 10.000 region.

Meta-Tag abuse

There are a number of Mega-Tag that are still are used by some search engines to arrange pages.

Through frequent misuse of these, the value was lost and large search engines, like Google, don't use these anymore.

With optimizers that really don't know what's going on nowadays, you still will find lots of keywords in the Mega tags. More often, keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of a page.

Advertizing sites abuse

Lots of linking to a page means a higher ranking by the search engines.

By overloading the advertizing pages with, for that specific section, nonsense advertisements, propagating the own site, one tries to achieve a higher ranking.

Often in the misuse of these sites one turns a blind eye. Sometimes there's a matter of just polluting the site..

But it's very malicious and certainly not in the best interest of the search engines or it's users.

Eventually, search engines will have to react to those who misuse advertizing sites in this manner and those who turn a blind eye to this type of misuse. Search engines that are clotted with nonsense results will do no good to the image of search engines.

Conclusion

If a company, that's involved with page optimizing, uses one of the above mentioned tricks, please think of what the consequenses can be when you're doing business with them.

A search engine robot that notices these tricks in your page, or an angry competitor that's blocked by your site and sends an e-mail to the search engines, can make sure your page is never to be found again!

Being found on the internet - search engines

A short guide on how to optimize your website, make it more usable and being found in searchengines.

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