Search Engines: How to break a search engine’s heart
There’s a lot of tutorials here on things that search engines like. It’s equally important to know what kind of things will get you banned, blacklisted, and shunned by search engines (such that they won’t return your phone calls or text messages, and they’ll avoid you in public settings…).
These are sometimes called “black hat” techniques, and they’re used to trick search engines into giving them higher rankings in ways that search engines don’t like. Search engines have figured most of these out, so employ them at your own peril…
If you’re unsure as to whether something is going to get you in trouble with search engines, there’s one concept that you can’t go wrong with: if it’s not human-friendly or it provides a poor user experience, search engines won’t like it.
It’s pretty simple–search engine spiders and trying to look at each web site they encounter as if they were human. If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. If you’re doing things that a human visitor wouldn’t find helpful, you’ll likely get in trouble for it.
Some things aren’t so serious, while some things will do for your search engine ranking what bankruptcy will do for your credit score. Here’s the bad stuff…
Spam: it’s only good for breakfast
Keyword spamming looks like this:
“Real estate investing is great. Try real estate investing when real estate investing works. Real estate investing money is great during bad real estate investing economic times and good real estate investing economic times.”
Humans would have a hard time reading a sentence like that. Using key words or phrases over and over again, like “real estate investing” mentioned above, is called keyword spamming.
Keyword spamming use to work much better than it does now. It use to be a spider would see “real estate investing” mentioned incessantly all over a web page and say to itself “this page must be an important real estate investing page…look at how often those words are used!”
But web sites, even sites about real estate investing, don’t read like the sentence above. Nowadays search engines realize that, if your site is useful for humans, it will mention “real estate investing” regularly but it will also talk about things that go along with real estate investing like financing, landlording, different strategies investors use, etc…
Spiders look for related terms amongst your key words because a useful page about real estate investing would naturally have those other terms present. If you stick to writing quality content, you’ll be fine.
Keyword spamming includes trying to include key words on a page that human visitors can’t see. This includes:
- Making key word the same color as page background or close to it
- Placing key words in <input type=”hidden”> tags
- Placing key words in image <alt> tags
- Placing key words between the <head> tags
- Placing key words behind css absolute positioned objects
- Making the text really tiny so people can’t read it or don’t notice it
Here’s a list of other black hat techniques that search engines are figuring out and penalizing people for. I’m not going to tell you how to do these things, but you should be aware of what they are:
Page swapping: Once a high rank is achieved, swapping that high ranked page with a page of non-related content
Doorway pages: Pages designed for good optimization, but humans who visit the page are immediately forwarded to a different page.
Cloaking: It’s possible to creating a web page that shows one page to spiders and a completely different page to human visitors. The spider page gets the rank and the human page displays whatever the cloaker wants.
Duplicate sites: To try and get more search engine attention, some people will make duplicate copies of the same site under different domain names.
Page hijacking: If you copy somebody’s web site and put it under a different domain name, you can fool search engines and visitors into thinking it’s the original site (example: copying Gap.com and creating MyGap.com and tricking people into visiting your site).
Scraper sites, spam blogs, and link farms: Create a bunch of fake sites with content on them (usually content copied from other sites) and then link each site back to your site to get more incoming links. Rumor has it that search engines will look to see where sites are hosted, and if they’re all hosted in the same place they’ll suspect something’s up.
The not-so-bad stuff
Here are some other things that will annoy search engines. While these may not get you blacklisted, they may put a “black mark” on your search engine credit score:
Site submission: Do not submit pages to search engines repeatedly. You won’t get a search engine to search you more often, and if you do it often enough you will get banned.
Excessive popups: Some sites (often pornography sites) will use excessive popups to hold a visitor on their site longer. Too much of this can get you banned.
Broken links: Sometimes you create a link on your site that doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes it’s a misspelling in your code, maybe you’re linking to a page or site that got moved or taken down, or you’ve angered the ghosts that haunt the internet and they’ve taken the page someplace where you’ll never find it.
Whatever the case may be, broken links happen occasionally and human visitors don’t like clicking on a link that takes them nowhere (unless you have an entertaining “404 Not Found” page, and then it’s not so bad). (I like this 404 page as well).
But spiders aren’t entertained by witty 404 pages, and they see broken links and an indication that your web site is not being taken care of or kept up-to-date.
Conclusion
This is just a list of the most common things that will get you in trouble with search engines. I have no doubt intrepid marketers will come up with more.
These techniques sometimes work for a short period of time. You could dedicate your whole life to keeping one step ahead of the search engines (and some people do), but trying to do so (or hiring someone to do so for you) will only end up hurting legitimate businesses.