TechWeb’s InformationWeek features an article this week about why not to cheat your site to the top of the search results. Sure it’s true if you say that better PageRanking, through SEO modifications, will increase your online sales, but the real question is : how long will this last and is it worth the investment? Search engines nowadays aren’t too happy anymore when they find out there’s cheaters who make profits using tricks to misguide the crawlers.
FYI: SEO = Search Engine Optimizer.
A little word on how the SEOs work and why their work seems to be of a temporarily nature. Quote from the article :
Basically, these companies will take what they know (or what they think they know) about how Google, Yahoo, and MSN Search rate Web pages, and then “tweak” your site to trick these search engines into thinking your site deserves to be rated higher. Here are some of the more prevalent tricks:
- Doorway pages: This is a page loaded with nothing but links going back to your site. Sprinkle a few of these doorway pages around and lo and behold, look at all those links going to your site. Must mean that your site’s pretty important, huh?
- Satellite sites: Similar to doorway pages, but instead of just having links on the page, why not add some content that’s on the same topic as your site? But let’s not go into the effort of actually developing new content on these pages, we can just duplicate the pages you already have, over and over and over again. And then just keep cross-linking these sites to each other. Oh yeah, that’ll fool Google.
- Keyword stuffing: Hey, I know you just sell tennis shoes, but what if we stuff keywords into your Web pages like “Angelina Jolie,” “Brad Pitt,” “Star Wars,” or whatever topic is currently hot? Then anyone searching to find out about the new Star Wars movie will see your site selling tennis shoes. Imagine how many new orders you’ll get. Why you’ll be picking out the carpeting for your private jet in no time.
- Hidden text: All right, it’s true that Google no longer uses the information in the keywords meta tag to rank pages. So let’s just take the keywords out of the tag and put them into the body of your page. Of course, that’d just look like gibberish to your real customers coming to your site, so we’ll make the text white and put it in front of a white background. That way it’s invisible to your customer, but the Google spider will still find it. Now, are you sure just one private jet will be enough?
Will these tricks work? Yes. In the short term they will help bump your site up a few positions on search engine results. Is it illegal to do this? No. As with most things regarding Internet law, lawmakers just can’t keep up with the pace of innovation. So what’s the downside, why wouldn’t everyone do this?
Ah, here’s the catch: Even though Google’s spider will give you the temporary bump up, it’ll also log in your site as a possible spam violation. Eventually, an extremely well-qualified software engineer from Google is going to go to your site and look through your source code, click through your links, and investigate the other sites that are linking to your site. And if he or she determines that you’re engaging in search-engine spam, that person will ban your offending pages, or even your entire site if the violations are egregious.
Read the entire article by Kin Quon on TechWeb’s InformationWeek.