The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly
OK, so if you want to know the best way to approach your SEO then read the rest of this site – that’s the good. However there are also the bad and the ugly!
There are various SEO strategies and tactics which will either hinder your positive progression in the search engines, flag you up for bad practices and decrease your rankings or at worst get you banned. It is worth pointing these practices out for a number of reasons.
a) Because some were legitimate SEO practices that have become out of date or no longer offer any value
b) Because some SEO’s still recommend them and they can still work but you need to be aware of the risk
c) Because some are in direct conflict with what the search engines are trying to achieve and you should avoid them
Here are the Bad and the Ugly of these SEO practices:-
Bad SEO
Over Optimisation
This is easy to do if you are uninformed, over enthusiastic or using a poor SEO partner. Anything that starts to make the site look like it is being written for search engines rather than users can be categorised as over optimisation. This can include – over use of keywords in page content, title tags, keyword tags, description tags, h tags and body copy, as well as over use of internal linking in copy and in footer links. Write for the user, not for the search engines.
Link Buying
This is officially frowned upon by the search engines, link buying sits in a strange limbo between an effective strategy and a potential ban. There are lots of successful sites that have built links by buying them. There are also lots of sites that have had their PageRank slashed because they bought links, sold links, linked to sites that sold links, or were linked to from sites that bought links. Balance and caution should be used.
Changing Content Too Often
The search engines love new content, they also like content which is updated, but if you change too much of your content too often they will lose trust in the content and how to index it. Add new pages, blogs and news but for older trusted content only optimise and update infrequently.
Ugly SEO
Hidden Text
This has been used widely to try and trick the search engines into ranking websites for content that the user never sees. Hidden text is most commonly achieved by setting the colour of the font to be the same as the background colour, making it invisible to the user. SEO’s have often used it to add content to a page when a client has not wanted the content for aesthetic or usability reasons. It has also been used by webmasters of gambling and pornographic sites to attempt to rank their sites for content which is unrelated to the actual subject matter. You should avoid hidden text at all costs.
Single Pixel Links
Once again these are links that are not visible to the user and therefore are counted as ‘hidden’. There are very few legitimate reasons for using single pixel links on a site and they have been used repeatedly to pass link juice to pages or sites that webmasters or SEO’s do not want the user of the site to see. You can fall foul of this if you have used an unscrupulous SEO or web development company who plant the link without your knowledge getting your site to drive PageRank to a site you have no knowledge of. Check your outbound links and steer clear of pixel links.
Doorway Pages
These are pages that are used as ‘bridges’ or ‘gates’ to either associated or un-associated pages. They are often pages which have content which is focused and optimised solely around one keyword but they do not actually sit within the standard architecture of the site. This means they are solely for search engines and cannot be reached by the user of the site, only through a search engine search or an external link. They are often used to ‘push’ traffic on to an actual site page using a prominent ‘click here’ or they are forwarded using a redirect or script. Any page that doesn’t actually sit within your site architecture and which you are trying to optimise is fairly suspect. It is even more suspect if the user actually never lands on it and is redirected to another page. Avoid doorway pages for SEO.
Cloaking
This is the practice of presenting content to search engines which is different to the content shown to the user through the browser. It is achieved by identifying the ‘user-agent’ which all search engine robots have and identifying if it is a user requesting the page or a search engine. If it is a search engine a server-side script shows an alternative version of a page to the robot. Most of the time the version shown to the robot is optimised differently to the page that the use sees. Once again this practice is seriously frowned upon by the search engines.
Link Farms
These grew in popularity in early 2000 focusing on websites like Inktomi, Hotbot and Yahoo! They were seen as an easy way to build links within a network of participating sites. They were originally reasonably innocent but as they started to become effective they became abused by unscrupulous web masters. By the time they had been abused and then identified by the more advanced search algorithms of Google, they were already being used by hundreds of thousands of sites which fell foul of the negative reputation they had developed. They still exist in various forms – exchanges for example and some companies still believe they offer a short sharp shock to improved rankings but it is a false economy and should be avoided.
