No Comments Written by Robert on July 24, 2008 – 5:25 pm

Search engines want to provide the most accurate and complete search results they can to their target market. After all, this is what drives all aspects of their business model. If people have no faith in a search engine, the traffic dries up and the search placement fees as well as advertising fees cease to exist.

Some Internet marketers try into positioning their sites higher in search results. These tricks do not work with every search engine, and if it is discovered that you are trying to dupe the search engines, some may not list you at all. Search engines are programmed to detect some of these techniques, and you will be penalized in some way if you are discovered.

A few of the search engine tricks pertaining to website design are as follows:

Repeating keywords - Some websites repeat the same keywords over and over again, by hiding them in the visible HTML, in invisible layers such as the <NOFRAMES> tag, and in your meta-tags.

Repeating keywords over and over again by displaying them at the bottom of your document after a number of line breaks counts as well! For example:

…games, games, games, games, video games, games, games, board games, online games, games, games, games, games…

This ill-fated technique is called keyword stacking, and it is quite obvious when a site is doing this. Its not so obvious cousin is called keyword stuffing, and this is when you exercise the same stacking techniques to aspects of the website that should not be optimized, such as spacer images. A spacer image is used by Web developers for just that - properly spacing items on a web page. It is not good practice to include descriptive text in an Alt tag for a spacer image.

Search engines are programmed to detect tricks

Jamming keywords - If you are displaying keywords in your Web web pages using a very small font, then you are jamming keywords. Why would you even do this unless you were specifically trying to manipulate search results? Don’t do it. This spam technique is called “tiny text.”

Hidden text and links - Avoid inserting hidden text and links in your website for the purpose of getting in more keywords. For example, you can hide keywords in your HTML document by making the text color the same as the background color. Another example is inserting keywords in areas not visible to the end user such as the hidden layers in style sheets.

Misleading title switchs - Making frequent and regular title switchs so that the bots think your site is a new site and list you again and again is misleading. In the case of directories, you could switch the name of your site just by adding a space, an exclamation mark (!), or “A” as the first character so that you come up first in alphabetical lists.

Web page Swapping - This practice involves showing one web page to a search engine, but a different one to the end user. Quite often you find people hijack content from a top-ranking site, insert it on their web page to achieve a top ranking, then replace that web page with a completely different web page when a desired ranking is achieved.

Content Duplication - Say you have one Web web page and it is ranking pretty well. You decide it would be nice to improve your ranking, but hey, it would be good to keep your current position too. You decide to duplicate your web page, fine-tune a few things, and call it something different. You then submit that web page to the search engine. Your ranking improved and now you have two listings. Not bad! Why not do it again? And so on and so forth. If you are caught duplicating Web web pages you will be penalized. Search engines want to provide unique content, not the same web web page over and over again.

Domain Spam (Mirrored Sites) - Closely related to content duplication, this is when an entire website is replicated (or slightly modified) and placed at a different URL. This is usually done to dominate search positions and to boost link popularity, but in the end all it does it hurt you when you get caught. You will get banned for practicing this technique.

Refresh Meta-tag - Have you ever visited a site and then been automatically transported to another web web page inside the site? This is the result of a refresh meta-tag. This tag is an HTML document that is designed to automatically replace itself with another HTML document after a certain specified period of time, as defined by the document author - it’s like automatic web web page swapping. Do not abuse this tag. Additionally, don’t use a redirect unless it is absolutely necessary.

A permanent redirect (HTTP 301) can be used to tell the search engines that the web web page they are looking for has a new home; this tells them to go there to index it. If you do use a refresh meta-tag to redirect users, then it is suggested that you set a slow down of at least 15 seconds and provide a link on the new web web page back to the web page they were taken from. Some businesses use refresh meta-tags to redirect users from a web page that is obsolete or no longer there. Refresh meta-tags also may be used to give an automated slideshow or force a sequence of events as part of a design element.

Cloaking - This technique is similar to web page swapping and using the refresh meta-tag in that the intent is to serve search engines one web page while the end user is served another. Don’t do it.

Doorway web pages - Doorway web pages, also known as gateway web pages and bridge web pages, are web pages that lead to your site but are not considered part of your site. Doorway web pages are focused web pages that lead to your website but are tuned to the specific “must” of the search engines. By having different doorway web pages with different names (e.g., indexa.html for AltaVista or indexg.html for Google) for each search engine, you can optimize web pages for individual engines.

Unfortunately, because of the need to be ranked high in search engine results and the enormous competition between sites that are trying to get such high listings, doorway web pages have become increasingly more popular. Each search engine is different and has different elements in its ranking criteria. You can see the appeal of doorway web pages because developing doorway web pages allows you to tailor a web page specifically for each search engine and thus achieve optimal results.

Search engines frown upon the use of doorway web pages because the intent is obvious - to manipulate rankings in one site’s favor with no regard for quality content. Do not use them.

Cyber-squatting - This term means to steal traffic from legitimate web pages. If someone were to operate a website called “Gooogle.com” with the extra “o” or “Yahhoo” with an extra “h,” that would be considered cyerb-squatting. Domain squatting is when a company acquires the familiar domain of another company, either because the domain expired or the original company no longer exists. The new company then uses the familiar domain to promote completely unrelated content. Google, in particular, frowns on cyber-squatting.

Links farms - These are irrelevant linking schemes to boost rankings based on achieving better link popularity. Having thousands of irrelevant links pointing to your website does more damage than good if you get caught!

For best results, only pursue links that relate to your website and are of interest to your target market. How do you know if you are spamming a search engine? If the technique you are employing on your website does not offer value to your end user and is done solely for the intention of increasing your search engine rankings then you are probably guilty of spam.