New Spam Techniques Catching Fire
by Gord Collins
A new set of tacticssome deem unethical are not being eliminated by Google from its search results.Google’s lack of action is making some wonder if their quality controlpeople are really on the job. The success of these tactics actually threatensthe viability of ethical search engine optimization and pushes SEO back intothe hands of common spammers.
I’m sureyou’ve heard about ethical search engine optimization at some point inyour research into search engine optimization practices and strategies.I’ve read search engine posts poking fun at, or outright ridiculing theconcept as naïve and useless. These people suggest that search engines arein business to make money and the search engine’s own business ethicsrevolves only around its own need to make money.
With Google’s recent discounting of link exchanges,favoring of authority sites, and the freedom of high pagerank sites to do asthey please along with their unbridled enthusiasm for the new algorithm, hasleft most Web site owners with few methods of gaining presence inGoogle’s search results. And that despite having thebest information or resources on a particular keyword topic.
Search engines do infact, have money making as their primary motivation since they are a businessentity and they do change their algorithms to improve their service. With thatchange, it seems a whole new set of ethics evolves and it can confuse and makeoptimizing for search engines seem like an impossible task.
On the other side ofthe issue are ethical SEO professionals. They believe that regardless of theindividual search engine’s current algorithm, the intent of a webmasterto use technical tricks and deceptive content that wastes users time, is not anacceptable practice.
However, one person’scoded redirect is another’s transitionstrategy and another person’s multidomainspam is another’s diversified content.
Several tricks andtactics are popular right now and are working with a fair degreeof success Google search engine listings of all places:
Paid Links disguised as real human written Links
Paid links are a hotissue right now and one that may not be solvable by a robot based searchengine. Sites arrange an “adbuy” where links will appear on hundreds of Web pages on several hundreddifferent Web sites. These paid links most often show up on shopping searchsites where thousands of products are listed. The link then appears to be anormal “commerce driven” link to a relevant consumer product. It isaccepted by Google along with the rest of the links.
Duplicate Domains
Why can’tGoogle detect two exactly similar web sites with only different domain names?How about these same sites ranking one and two for the very same phrase? Well,this happens too frequently and it’s due to Google’s preoccupationwith linking within topically related sites. Domain spam is disguised as acorporation’s attempt to have web sites for its different subsidiaries.Those with many subsidiaries get a big boost from these domains. Those withoutsubsidiaries can simply invent new products and services and portray them aslegitimate and separate entities. Theyare increasingly being hosted on different IP addresses and even in differentgeographical locations.
Link patterndetection used by Google has difficulty dealing with this practice and isfailing in dealing with it. Google’s new emphasis on authority sitesactually makes this matter worse.
Non Robot Detectable Redirects
<body onMouseOver="eval(unescape('%6C%6F%63%61%74%69%6F%6E%2E%686F%70%69%63%62%61%74%6F%6E%73%2E%6E%65%74%2F%27%3B'));"
The use of a mouseover code(above) is quietly gaining a strong level of usage. The code automaticallyredirects the visitor to another page, but only upon the mouse pointer beingover the page itself. Since a search engine robot doesn’t have a mousepointer, it is blind to the tactic. The tactic is combined with a server sideredirect to another page, which may or may not be relevant. The purpose of the redirect may be apart of bigger ploy to support another ranking strategy.
Humungous Machine-Generated Web Sites
Some technically-ablewebmasters are able to stretch a minimal amount of content across thousands ofpages. The pages are built with templates and the sentences within them arebasically shuffled from one page to the next with unique title tags pluggedinto each page generated. It’s basically the same page repeated hundredsor thousands of times.
This technique ismost often used with e-commerce pages that have a product for sale. Often, theproducts are simply re-organized, or shuffled to create another page thatappears to be unique. It’s actually the same products presented countlessdifferent ways.
Gord Collins
SEO Specialist
Bay Street SEO
http://www.bayst-search-engine-optimization.com
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
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