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Search engine optimization and marketing swindlesIt’s a desert out there…full of snakes and scorpions. As you evaluate firms to handle your web site optimization and marketing, watch out if any of them employ these outlaw techniques.
There’s right and there’s wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you’re living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you’re dead as a beaver hat. John Wayne in “The Alamo” Swindle #1: The 1,000+ Submission Plan The most common swindle. You receive a solicitation, usually e-mail spam, from someone offering to submit your web site to thousands of search engines for a relatively low fee. Keep your money. There aren’t more than a dozen search engines worth consideration, and of those, only Google, Yahoo! and MSN are current contenders. Swindle #2: Hidden Text One of the lowest cheats in the industry; guaranteed to get you run out of town by a search engine. The SEO outlaw creates hidden text by making the text color on a web page the same as the background color. This makes text invisible to the casual visitor, but not to the search engine. This technique is used to “trick” search engines into indexing text that’s “not really there.” Click for demonstration Swindle #3: Auto-redirects Auto-redirects are often used for legitimate purposes. It becomes a swindle when designed to display a different page to the visitor than what the search engine spider saw. The visitor will click on a link and arrive at the appropriate page, only to be redirected within a second to an entirely different page. Click for demonstration Swindle #4: Cloaking Page cloaking is another way of tricking search engine spiders. Web servers can easily determine if a visitor is a human or a search engine spider. A cloaked site will show a highly optimized page when it detects that a spider is visiting, but will send a human web surfer to an entirely different page. Hint: It takes some technical know-how to spot this swindle. Be suspicious if the content of the site doesn't match your search or the listing shown by the search engine. Swindle #5: Complete Page Frames The poor man’s cloak (more appropriately called “cloaking for the technically challenged”). A web page utilizes a full-window frame, into which another page is placed. Search engine spiders see content on the encompassing frame page, while visitors only see the page inside the frame. Hint: If you click on the links of a page and the URL in the browser address bar doesn't change, but the page does, you’re probably looking at a frame. Swindle #6: Link Farms A hard sell attempted by many of these swindlers is the link farm. Link farms are created exclusively to increase a site’s link popularity, but they rarely have relevant content on them. Having a link to your site on a page with no useful content will not contribute positively to your site’s link popularity. Worse, if a search engine does pay attention to a link farm, it’s probably only to ban the sites that are listed there. Swindle #7: The Slam Not really a swindle in the search engine spamming sense, but worth mentioning here just the same. If you are familiar with long distance phone slamming, then you should understand this similar approach. It involves a company you never heard of sending you an official-looking bill to renew your annual web site marketing services (which you never heard of either). A lot of people actually fall for this! Can you imagine? What to do? What to do?!? (hand wringing optional) Well…(wink)…you could contact us and get started today on the path to increased web traffic. We’re certified, homogenized, pasteurized and, doggone it, people like us.
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