SEO Malpractice

 

The following list is just a few common “black hat” techniques th at cowboys will use in order to get fast results so as to take your money and run! Google will heavily penalise your site when the following “cheats” are present on your site.

 

• Hiding content.

 

An attractive web page with effective images is attractive to your customer and will offer a good image of your business. However, images aren’t read by google and your site will not hold any relevance to your chosen key search terms. A common cheat for this problem is to have hundreds of keywords on the webpage but have them hidden to the naked eye. This is achieved by reducing the size of the text and using a colour which matches the background.

 

• Cloaking.

 

A famous example of this is when BMW were banned from google. They produced a large site full of keyword rich content that was very attractive to the search engines but not to the naked eye. They allowed google to “spyder” this site in order to make google think the site was full of relevant information to the end user. BMW replaced the site after it had been scanned with a flash and image rich site that was attractive to the end user but had no relevant content. This process is called “cloaking” and your business will be banned from google.

 

• Gateway pages.

 

This is a process similar to cloaking. A page is produced with no imagery but full of text content full of keyword. Google will see this page as highly relevant and the page would appear high in the search results. However by using a small piece of code this page will automatically re-direct to the real homepage of your site. This practice will ultimately destroy the prospect of any future rankings in google.

 

• Paid links.

 

Back-links are a major factor in obtaining a good page rank. Obtaining links is an extremely difficult thing to do and takes plenty of hard work, skill and time . The way cowboys operate is that they will buy links in there thousands from “link farms”. This is where you can pay as little as $50 for 3000 links. If google sees paid links to your site you will be penalised heavily.