It
seems you can’t turn around without running into a
different Internet scam.
As
businesses have begun looking for search engine
optimization specialists, scammers have seized the
opportunity to make an easy dollar. It sounds simple:
you hire a company to make your site look better to
search engine spiders. They promise results, but you
never see any. We have created this page to inform you
why. |
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The 100,000
Submission Plan
The most obvious
thing to avoid when searching for a company to optimize your site is
a claim to submit to 60,000 search engines or directories a month.
We constantly encounter companies offering to do just that. (They
also charge big bucks to do it).
Here is the
problem: there are not 60,000 search engines and directories worth
your submission. Would you want or need your accounting firm’s home
page listed on “Joe’s Directory of Furniture Sites”?
Some search engine
optimization companies offer to submit to even larger numbers of
search engines and directories, for higher fees, of course. They
claim to submit to 60,000, 100,000 or even 150,000 search engines
and directories every month. Where are all these submissions going?
What good does it do your web site? While common sense (and the
results) say that this kind of submission does little, if anything,
to boost your search engine ranking, many have been swayed by huge
numbers – we have talked with business people who have spent
literally thousands of dollars on these so-called optimization
services, only to see no change in their search engine ranking.
Link Farms
Another marketing
“technique” to avoid is joining link farms. Link farms are created
exclusively to increase a site’s link popularity. The more links you
have to your site, the more reputable your site appears to a search
engine and the better your ranking will be. Unfortunately, the sites
linked together in link farms usually have nothing to do with each
other. Search engines loathe link farms and will often punish the
sites found there.
Link farms are
essentially trying to cheat the system. Search engines are in the
business of providing good, relevant web pages in response to a
person's search. If all one had to do is submit to 100,000 link
farms and suddenly the page would rank #1 on the search engines,
every scammer on the planet would simply submit his pornographic,
spyware-filled, or otherwise undesirable site to thousands of link
farms.
In response to this
kind of ranking abuse, search engines completely ignore link farms.
In fact, many search engines even penalize web sites that use link
farms in an effort to boost their link popularity.
In short, be wary
of people offering to link to you. If you are linking to a site that
has content similar to yours so your visitors can get more
information (or vice-versa), you are ok. However, if you have joined
a site containing nothing but link after link after link, you are
hurting your site's search engine ranking.
Auto-redirects
Many unscrupulous
optimization companies also overlook the simplest optimization
techniques. Redirect pages (pages that appear for a few seconds then
flash to another page automatically) are a big no-no, search engine
spiders hate them and penalize sites that use this technique.
Cloaking
Page cloaking has
emerged as another way of tricking search engine spiders. Web
servers can easily determine if a visitor is a human or a search
engine spider. These sites will show an optimized page to the search
engine spiders, but will send a human web surfer to an entirely
different-looking page. Because of the potential for abuse, search
engines treat any form of page cloaking as spam and will penalize
the web sites that use it.
Hidden Text
Hidden text, one of
the very worst search engine faux pas. Designers create hidden text
by making the text colour the same as the page background colour so
that the text is not readable. Finding hidden text is easy, just
highlight any areas of the page that appear blank and it will show
up.
Hidden text used to
be a way to “trick” search engines. Search engines can read hidden
text, and several years ago they would have indexed the hidden text
right along with the visible content on your page. Nowadays search
engines will not only ignore the hidden text, they will most
certainly block your page (or entire site) as well!
Feel free to
contact us
at any time to discuss your search engine optimization/marketing
options, or
read more about our marketing
services.
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