SEO the bad way…

*This blog has been permanently moved to eydryan.com 

I’ve found a few sites which use covert SEO techniques which to quote Google “violate the guidelines”. What they do is use a CSS style which reduces text-size to 1px, set the font color to the page background, and sets the margin to 0px so the technique is quite invisible to human eyes. One way of interpreting this is that they think that by hiding it from us, Google doesn’t care that it’s full of stuffed keywords. It makes sense initially since you don’t usually include css files into the sitemap but that doesn’t mean Google can’t index them on its own. However, if the robots.txt is made to forbid Google from opening that CSS it may not look at it. But that’s somewhat stupid since Google probably has this kind of check integrated. What is presumed right now is that Google uses a text browser and can detect keyword stuffing even if it’s hidden. The result? Rankings plummet, and theoretically, in some time, your results will disappear altogether.

It seems Google is trying to make sure its results are as genuine as possible since they said:

“If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines.”

Also, they mentioned Google does not like cloaking, and for you who don’t know, cloaking is practically serving Google Bots pages which are different from the ones normal users see. It’s another unethical practice that the search engine seems to have detected what a Danish company claimed to be “undetectable”. They’re hitting black hat SEO techniques hard, and that’s a good thing for their index. There will always be black hat optimizers and some of them will manage to stay ahead of Google’s smart indexing and anti-spam filters. But the downsides to this are very dangerous, since it may mean exclusion from Google and that’s a big blow to your company.

I feel that black hat seo techniques are in demand since they tend to be effective in the short run and give immediate, cheap results. It’s a classic example of interruption marketing, where a marketer will try to do all he can to interrupt you from your leisurely Google search and hit you with something to sell, which is usually a bad thing to do anyway. The normal SEO, coupled with a good link building strategy, and smart redesign of the site to enhance usability and interface, should offer you much better and safer results in the long run.

Black hat SEO methods should always be avoided by smart people, that is, unless you’re a brilliant mathematician and can really find out the formula of Google’s PageRank engine. Anyway, better safe than sorry, and never think of cost as an impediment to SEO, because unlimited distribution to your customers is priceless. Of course, if the client can’t justify a very high expense, a social norm of fairness and from that need should arise, where both parties must negotiate and see the ups and downs of any offer they accept.

These have been just one or two black hat techniques since they’re pretty visible (get firebug and edit the css to uncover this, you’ll surely find some sites using it) and I wouldn’t really want to give too many ideas to you.

And, to close it off, I’ll present a little case study of mine regarding a little lawyer’s office who used these techniques. Firstly, they hosted on a free domain which is always a bad idea, since in their case they got half the page full of ads and Google may not even count subdomains in the calculation of the SEO score.  Then, they used keyword stuffing, in the head, in the meta description, the meta title, hidden text at the top of the page, and so on, not to mention the fact that the site was Flash so Google couldn’t index it properly. What was the result of this? Last week it was number one for the generic keyword it was targeted at. Two days ago it stood there with a pagerank of zero, on the fourth place. Today, I see it has fallen to fifth place and the only thing keeping it up is the traffic foolish users give it. Also, the whole site is a scam in itself, offering amazing prices but only doing a very small part of the task the keyword advertised. However, as a result of the hits, pagerank is now two, but it has also created some links from directories which account for a lot of that. I’ll keep watching this site since there’s no indexing this month, and see when it dies out completely.

I hope you liked this first article, and if you did please comment on it, and if you need SEO consulting, we can discuss it via email, at eydryan[at]gmail.com. Until then, I hope this has taught you something nice and I’ll see you tomorrow when I’ll be telling you about my adventure with sitemaps…