Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

This post is dedicated to some of the tricks people try to play on search engines. The following are some of the most common current techniques:

• reciprocal link trading, free-for-all link exchanges, and other bottom feeder links arenot effective
• page onload redirects arerisky, but some do well with it short term
• link renting areeffective if you are creative
• interlinking many small sites to gain popularity areeasy to leave footprints unless it is done well
• keyword stuffing and hiding text either on or off the page arenot effective unless intent looks legitimate
• cloaking areeffective until they catch it
• automated content generation aredepends on intent
• cross site scripting errors areeffective short term, but usually solved quickly

Why They Usually Do Not Work

Free-For-All

Free-for-all link exchanges are very easy for search engines to spot. Once they are spotted, they get issued a spam penalty, and many get deleted from the search engine index.

As long as there is some small amount of value, adult or drug web site webmasters will find it. After one finds it, many follow, and then the site becomes worthless. If you excessively trade links or pick up many other low quality links it may make your good link vs bad link ratio look abnormal, or create other reasons to discount your authority and relevancy.

Some people use automated bots to scour the web for links. They still work for some spammers, but they really annoy some people and can ruin your brand, and should not be used for long-term businesses.

Page Onload Redirects

Meta redirects with short time duration may be offered a small penalty to lower their relevancy. Google has been doing a better job of spidering JavaScript redirects recently and has penalized many sites that were using mouseover redirects. Yahoo! editors may remove your site from their search index if they notice deceptive redirects.

If you do move a site or page, you can use a 301 redirect to allow the link popularity to pass through to the new location. That is not considered deceptive to do so long as the pages are about the same topic.

If you do move site locations, you will want to leave the old site up for about a week to ensure search engines and Internet service providers have updated the old DNS details for your site before taking it down. Ensure you keep the old domain registered after you move your site so that the links from your redirect domain stay active. Some people let them lapse and lose much of their link equity when the well linked domains expire.

Link Renting

When renting links make sure you rent relevant links. The more under the radar your link buy is the more likely it is to be affordable and carry weight long-term. Why?

If few marketers are looking at the same sources as you do then your sources may be cheaper than expected and stay out of the range of most marketers because they may not think of them as being accessible. Also, if your bought links look like organic citations AND few people are getting links from the same sources the odds are quite low that search engines are going to want to devalue them.

When renting links, it is usually best to focus on quality and relevancy over quantity. Rent links that will drive direct traffic from related sites. That provides the maximum return potential while providing the minimum risk exposure.

It is important to consider risk exposure when renting links as well. If you are too aggressive with renting links it may not only waste your money, but it may get your site banned for relevancy manipulation.

The best way to buy or rent links is typically indirectly, by creating some sort of packaged value system, contest, or controversy that many people are willing to link at. By creating packaged value systems it makes it harder for competitors to reverse engineer and replicate what you have done, while providing a link profile that looks more natural to search engineers.

Creating a Link Network

In 2006 Google really started pushing up the rewards for having an authority domain, so creating many smaller sites in link networks is generally not as profitable as it once was.

One of the biggest benefits of creating mini sites is that it allows you to segregate risks, business models, and audience profiles.

• If a company you affiliate with would not like to associate their brand with an aggressive cheesy viral link campaign then you might be able to use that link campaign to build up a feeder site not directly associated with the monetization model.
• If you are using an aggressive or underhanded marketing technique making it look as though some independent affiliate was responsible is another way to shield your brand from damage due to questionable tactics. Just look at how many content spammers Google pays to clutter up Yahoo! and MSN search results with spammy AdSense sites.
• If you wanted to tap a market and a group that hates that market it would be hard to do both using a single brand and domain.

Creating link networks can be an effective SEO technique if done correctly, though if your link renting or site networks are done exclusively to manipulate search results, and it is easily detectable, you may get penalized (by algorithms or human editors employed by search engines).

Linking a bunch of small sites together also shows up easily if you do not have a bunch of different external links pointing into your link network. Many search engines also have the ability to devalue links from the same C block IP range or from the same owner. Make sure if you do this that your sites look legitimate and unique, or that you use mixed WhoIs data, various hosts for different sites, and get many links pointing into your sites from outside your network if you are trying to create a somewhat sketchy network.

If you create link networks and do not have original, useful content on each site (and reasons for creating the many sites), then you are taking a risk that your site may be removed from search results.

Hidden Text

While it is sometimes hard for a search engine to find, fellow webmasters may rat you out to the search engines for hiding text. Hidden text usually exists on sites that have other problems as well. If the search engines find it, they may drop the site.

Keyword stuffing and using invisible text adds little on the reward side; there are far more effective SEO techniques to use.

Sometimes the legitimacy of a technique is determined by who did it. For example, if your site accepts user feedback and some of your users are bad at spelling it does not look bad, but if you were to manually stuff a bunch of misspelled keywords on the bottom of a page that would look much more questionable.

Cloaking

If cloaking is done correctly, it is hard to detect. The problem with deceptive cloaking is that it builds no intrinsic value. As the web grows, your site stays stagnant. I would not be interested in chancing my long-term financial stability on the ability of one software program to stay ahead of the major search engines indefinitely.

If you use cloaking, I would recommend going with one of the best, FantoMaster.com

Automated Content Generation

If you create a new collaborative filter or a value system that makes people want to add quality content to your site that will generally be viewed as a positive thing.

If you scrape content from other sources and add little to no value and are aggressive with your ad placement the site is much less likely to stick.

Duplicate content detection has improved greatly. Some search engines may also have filters which compare a site's growth rate to its historical growth rate, or its content growth rate vs link growth rate.

Cross Site Scripting Errors

Some content management systems have errors which allow webmasters to add links to other websites or create pages on other websites. Some search spammers create finance and pharmacy pages on trusted domains. These pages generally rank well for a short period of time until the search engines find the footprint and remove the associated pages from their indexes.

Why Frames are Evil

Though it is not typically a spam technique, I recommend that you not use frames. The problem with frames is that everything on the Internet has an easily accessible defined location, except framed pages.

When the home page of a framed site has a defined location, the search engine will not group the other pages as part of their frame sets. All the internal documents will show as stand-alone pages which will require you to use redirects to display the frameset. You can use a noframes tag to allow search engines to read the content, but you will still have other major problems.

The most evil thing about frames is that if I do not know what the URL of one of your great articles is, then how can I link to it? If I can't link people directly to the most targeted and relevant piece of information on your site then the odds are good that I will not link or will just link elsewhere.

Aggressive SEO Practices Which Still Help

When a person is paying for placement in the Yahoo! Directory, they are renting links the same way that "unethical" SEO firms are. Ethics is generally a bogus term to use in relation to SEO. Effective versus ineffective and risk versus reward are better ways of describing different SEO practices.

When buying links, you should look at local 501(c) tax-exempt organization sites, blogs, and other sites that sell high-value, authoritative links rather cheaply. Sometimes sites inside your industry will rent or sell links at reasonable prices as well. The more relevant a link is, and the more editorial it seems, the less risk there is in the purchase.

Aggressive SEO Firms

Many people will play the ethics angle to promote themselves. Search engine ethics is a rather bogus concept when you consider some ethical SEO firms are getting paid to promote corporations which use sweatshop labor.

It is important that you can trust your SEO, and you should know if they are doing anything which could get you punished. It is a fact, though, that the search engines and SEO firms owe each other absolutely nothing when it comes to the organic search results.

I recently became more aggressive, though I am still rather conservative in comparison to many SEO firms. It is a balancing act. One project I create pure spam, and then on the next project I might be whiter than white. Use the right tool for the right job.

Link purchasing is an effective form of advertisement, just like buying a billboard. Quality, underpriced links are not going to be easy to find unless you think of the web as a social network composed of people and ideas.

If something seems like a thing you have never heard of before, or it cannot be easily explained, then it should probably be questioned or explored further before participating in.

If the idea shows search engines one thing and then shows the user something else, it is generally not a good practice unless it is via paid inclusion or is done by an extremely talented SEO with the risk profile explained to you in depth beforehand.

Other Problems

Flash

Often people like to use Flash to show off their web design talents. Many people are overwhelmed by Flash content. Some dial-up visitors will not wait for your Flash to load. Search has become such an effective advertising medium in large part because of its simplicity.

I strongly urge not using Flash on most web sites because it gives search engines inadequate content to read. If you do not give search engines much text, then you will need a larger linking campaign to get that page to rank well. If you do embed a Flash object, make sure you include HTML content in the page, and either use Flash Object for Flash detection or provide content inside noembed tags to help search engines understand what is inside the flash.

<NOEMBED>My happy textual content...with links to the other
relevant pages</NOEMBED>

Session IDs & Do Not Feed Search Engines Cookies

Assuming you have many quality incoming links and your site is still not indexed after an extended period of time, you should evaluate the crawlability of your site. If you have not received a spam penalty and your site was not previously banned, you may have technical issues.

There are many dynamic web sites which only get a fraction of their web pages indexed. Search engines are getting better at finding and crawling dynamic pages, but they still do not like cookies or session ids. Search engines will not accept a cookie, and if a search engine thinks you are giving it a session ID number, it will not want to cache your pages (and if they do you will run into duplicate content issues).

If search engines indexed sites that gave them session ID numbers, they could draw too much from the site in a quick amount of time and crash the server, they could get the idea that the site is much larger than it actually is, or they could fill their index up with pages that no longer exist. If you have a shopping cart, do not issue a session ID until an item is placed in the cart.

Dynamic Site Fiction

Some ill-informed people say that search engines penalize sites for having a .asp or .php extension. This is complete garbage.

Search engines read any page as hypertext no matter what the file extension is. If a site is not getting indexed, it usually is lacking in sufficient inbound link popularity, is using JavaScript or other client-side navigation that spiders may not follow, has complex URLs with too many variables, has many dad URLs, has duplicate content issues, or is issuing the search engine spiders a session ID or cookies.

One URL for Each Unique Content Unit

At the end of the day, search engines want as much useful valuable content as they can index. Each additional useful document improves their relevancy, marketshare, and allows them to sell more ad space.

Some people use rotating URLs or create many pages using printer-friendly versions and different versions based on size and color. If many of your pages are almost exactly the same, or if the URLs that search engines index are usually dead when they go back to re-index them, there stands a good chance that search engines will not want to index your site very well.

Limit the options you offer search engines to the pages you actually want indexed.

Disable Cookies

Search engines do not accept cookies. If your site gives cookies, try turning cookies off, and see your site how some search engines see it. If, when cookies are disabled, a session ID is placed in the URL to search spiders, it could cause indexing problems.

Dynamic Site Tips

To get dynamic content spidered, I recommend doing the following:

• Use two or less variables if possible. If you use many variables, you may also want to try rewriting your URLs.
• Keep each product or category ID variable at or below ten digits.
• The variable id= is often associated with session IDs. Search engines do not want to index multiple copies of the exact same content and may avoid portions of your site if they think that a parameter is a session ID. Avoid using ID in your URL. Instead of using ID=345 or catID=345 use prod=345 or cat-345 in the URL.
• If you are having indexing issues, your site is new and is not yet indexed, or you are doing a major infrastructure update you may want to rewrite your URLs using descriptive clean static looking URLs over ugly variable filled URLs.
• Building a site map and linking to related pages can also help spiders find your inner pages.
• If you do not have hundreds or thousands of inbound links into a large, database-driven site, then only a small portion of your site is likely to get indexed.
• If you have pages of limited content value you may want to prevent search engines from indexing them to save that link equity for indexing more important content.

If you have a database-driven site with sensitive data, you may also want to change the database error pages so it is harder for hackers to find their ways into your database.

Content Management Systems

URL Rewriting

If you are using an Apache server, you can use mod rewrite to write your filenames and file paths as descriptive URLs. Microsoft servers also have custom rewriting software solutions like ISAPI_Rewrite.

Wrong Server Status or Server Misconfigured

If you use a custom error script, make sure that the error page returns a 404 header code. Also make sure your regular pages return a proper 200 series status code.

Another rare error is a misconfigured server clock. If search engines do not think a document has changed since they last visited it, then some of them will not spider the document again.

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