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Unethical SEO Techniques – Batter Up! By: Johnny Mayer
Unethical SEO Techniques, does it matter if people use them? You better believe it! In a democracy, freedom of speech encourages public debate and new ideas. Denial of free speech is associated with dictatorships, not freedom In the virtual world of Internet, “spamdexing” or “black hats” are an unethical SEO techniques that denies legitimate website optimizers (a.k.a. “white hats”) from their rightful search traffic.
Spamdexing – What is it?
Search engine spamming or Spamdexing, significantly raises the chance a web page or site will reach the top of search engine results for a given search word. People and companies that use dishonest techniques to manipulate and raise their search engine rankings, using unethical SEO techniques. They are denying ethical websites their right to be seen and heard. It ‘s only natural that website owners seek the highest rank for their website on in search engines and SEO their pages diligently. It’s unethical for spamming sites to manipulate search engines for high search engine placement at the expense of what may be YOUR WEBSITE. You play fair and deserve to be protected from cheaters stealing your website visitors, income and publicity.
"Black Hats" SEO - How Do They Work?
Unethical websites pollute the internet with garbage content we have all been fooled by these rogue websites to visit a page for info we need quickly and find it’s full of garbage. Search engines use algorithms to determine page ranking and relevancy of your search words. For example, does your search word appear in the web page’s meta keywords tag? Is it the subject of the web page? Does it match other search terms found in web page’s text? The unethical websites distort the system for their benefit and your expense. This example and many others show how unethical SEO’s use spamming, code swapping and other “black hat” techniques to manipulate the search engines for their own benefit.
Unethical Websites – Misleading the Public
Search engine spammers know the content of their pages is lousy at best and an insult to human intelligence. Most of their web pages are rarely useful to people that visit their websites. The methods of these unethical websites are aimed at placing their pages with useless content above relevant websites in search engines. The unethical websites forced Google and other search engines to revamp search technology and to develop better, faster more sophisticated spam filters. These filters detect the use of these methods and ban these websites forever from the search results. This led to Google’s Page Rank and link analysis approach for better search results and combating keyword spamming.
Here are a few techniques used by unethical SEO’s:
Hidden - Invisible Text
“Black hats” sometimes create dense keyword pages full of phrases in the same color as the background so you (the user) don’t seem them, but the search engine robot reads different content than the human visitor, and may find these pages to be relevant and raise their rank. The goal is to cause the page appear more relevant to a web crawler and easy to index. For example, unethical websites create hidden text as a fan page for a leading band or celebrity for listing on fan site to create lots of traffic by deception.
Keyword Stuffing
In the past, search engines just counted how many times keywords showed up on a page to compute its relevance. As people “know” search engines read your pages’ content to determine your rank, they try repeating the keyword over and over to increase its density thus to mislead the robot to “think” this page is very relevant to that keyword. Today, search engines’ algorithms, mainly Google’s HILTOP algorithm analyzes web pages to prevent Keyword stuffing above accepted, readable levels.
Meta tag Stuffing
Like keyword stuffing, meta tag stuffing is based on using repeated keywords over and over and that may have no relevance to the site's actual content, or just overdo a good thing.
Gateway & Doorway Pages
The unethical websites produce low quality web pages with lousy content stuffed with similar key words and phrases. Designed to rank at the top of search results, doorway pages often say "Click here to enter" or a similar phrase. From the user’s perspective – you want to get directly to the page you looked for, not to a page which directs you to click to get to another page…
Hidden Links
Hidden links, similar to hidden text are used by “black hats” where visitors will not see them, whereas search engine crawlers will, to increase link popularity and search engine rankings for specific keywords.
Sybil Attack
A Sybil attack is based on multiple identities for malicious intent, named after the personality disorder. One technique is to put up multiple web sites at different domain names that all link to each other. Another technique used by the unethical websites is to use links on weblogs and wiki's submitted by anonymous users.
Mirror Websites
Mirror sties are multiple websites with the same content and different URLs. Some search engines raise the rank of sites that have the keyword in their URL.
Page Redirects
Unethical websites create redirects send the web surfer to another page without his clicking on the other page. This is done using the META refresh tags, CGI scripts, Java, JavaScript, Server side redirects or server side techniques.
Cloaking & Code swapping
Cloaking provides the search engine a different version of a web page than the web page the surfers see on the website. Code swapping is swapping one page for another to achieve a high search engine ranking by dishonest web promoters.
Winner’s Don’t Cheat – Cheaters Don’t Win
This paper summarizes the main unethical SEO techniques people use. You may use this article to make sure that these “black hats” unethical SEO techniques don’t appear on your website. You can also check and see whether your competitors are playing a fair game or not.
When I was a kid my mother used to tell me “Cheaters never win and winners never cheat” Does this apply in the Internet Era? Sure, their will also be unethical websites and unethical people in a free society. Do they threaten the Internet community, absolutely not. Like a heckler at a ball game, they are just a nuisance, the real game is on the field..
Batter up! |
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