Is SEO just another form of spam?

Sadly, we have heard prospective clients express the concern that all SEO is unethical, akin to spam. Those folks have heard that sentiment from others they trust, and that may be a hard opinion to displace.

Yes, Virginia, there IS ethical SEO

But the truth is that there definitely is ethical SEO, and that’s all the SEO we practice here at Rank Magic. We even have an entire page on our website devoted to it. Catherine Kozar at Affiliate Marketers College recently wrote about the subject and included a video from Matt Cutts, The Google Guy. that bears on the subject.

Catherine talks about the temptations to cut corners, to employ black hat SEO techniques, to write misleading titles and descriptions, to use hard sell hype pages that offers no real content, and so forth. All that is counterproductive in the long run, and Google expects those practices to become far less prevalent within the next five years as Matt Cutts explains that Google (and others) will filter them out of organic search results.

Check out Catherine’s post here.

Last month, the New York Times published an article about a search engine optimization investigation of  J.C. Penney. Puzzled by how well jcpenney.com did in organic search results for just about everything they sold, they asked an SEO expert to look into it a bit more. The investigation found that thousands of unrelated web sites (many that seemed to contain only links) were linking to the J.C. Penney web site. And most of those links had really descriptive anchor text (the clickable ntext of the links). It seemed that someone had arranged for all of those links in order to get better rankings in Google.

The Times presented their findings to Google. Googler Matt Cutts confirmed that the tactics violated the Google webmaster guidelines and soon the J.C. Penney web site was nowhere to found for the queries they had previously ranked number one for. Matt tweeted that “Google’s algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken”.

J.C. Penney, when contacted by the Times, claimed they didn’t know anything about the links and promptly fired their SEO firm, SearchDex.

So where did J.C. Penney go wrong? Why did they do it? What have they lost? And how do they get it back? Read on to learn more and make sure this doesn’t happen to you.

• The original NY Times article “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search”
• Search Engine Land’s full discussion of the whole affair

Jill Whalen, noted Boston SEO guru, is conducting an experiment to see if Google actually cares about how websites get to the top of their search results. Her guess is that they don’t, or they would have done something about it a long time ago.

You can participate in that experiment.If you have competitors who are beating you out in search engine results through spammy, deceptive, or unethical SEO practices, go to the website for Rat Out Your Competitor. Let them know what your competitor is doing, and they’ll look into it and report it directly to Google.

We’ve written a lot in the past about the importance of link popularity for good search engine rankings. Link popularity counts even more heavily in Google than in the other search engines and it’s not something you can ignore. Links from a web site’s Helpful Resources page are good, but the best links are those that are embedded within a content rich paragraph related to your business. Couple that with the recent increased emphasis by Google on timely information from social networking sources like Twitter and blogs, and you have the basis for a new business model.

There’s a savvy little company called Net-Writers that’s been getting some impressive results with a niche service to help clients gain SEO traction by leveraging the power of this kind of relevant content. They build numerous inbound content-relevant, keyword-rich links by creating and publishing multiple blog posts for a client.  They start with 50 blog posts, each one with three keyword-rich links pointing to the page on their client’s site that’s optimized for them. This can be a powerful technique to supplement the on-page SEO and traditional link building we do at Rank Magic.

The copy they create won’t win prizes for style but it is professionally written and won’t embarrass their clients. This content is also totally controlled, which means it can be edited or taken down if the client has any accuracy or style issues with it.

Net Writers guarantees positive results, too, which they define as an improvement in your ranking position for your keywords. I haven’t seen the wording of that guarantee so I don’t know if it’s specific to Google or Yahoo or Bing, how much of a ranking improvement they promise, or whether they promise improvement on all of your targeted keywords. What I can say, though, is that I’m satisfied their approach works.

Net-Writers’ approach to link building isn’t Black Hat SEO, but it’s not totally White Hat SEO either; I think we need a new category of Gray Hat SEO. That’s because these blog posts are designed to feed keyword-rich links to the search engines, and aren’t really designed to drive traffic to your site in and of themselves. Will search engines eventually learn to detect this technique and lower the value of the links it generates? I doubt it. These are real blog posts, not fakes, and distinguishing them from totally innocent blog posts that just happen to link to a web site would be difficult or impossible. Only time will tell about that, but for now, and for many  businesses, this approach should realize measurable benefits.

There are deceptive SEO companies out there — we refer to them as “black hat” companies who use unethical techniques to get your site near the top of the rankings. Their techniques often work well in the short term, but they don’t produce long-term results and often they can get your web site banned from the search engines.

Small Business Trends has an article on 5 things that may reveal a black hat SEO company:

1 – keyword stuffing
2 – overuse of bold text and links
3 – hidden links
4 – complicated link schemes
5 -multiple domains or subdomains with essentially the same content

See the article for the complete skinny on these shady techniques.

Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter.

In her recent newsletter, she dealt with a question that revealed some shoddy SEO work. Please be assured that Rank Magic never does this sort of thing!

Dear Jill,

We recently released our new website in Feb. and prior to release we held the number 1 position on Google for [our main keyword phrase] and the number 3 slot and number 2 spots for [additional keyword phrases].

Within days of our release our rankings fell through the roof as did the number of quality Google leads that were coming through our doors. We seem to still be holding up well on the other sites but still not like we did before. We have an SEO firm working with us and we have been with them for 4 years. At this time I am starting to wonder why we continue to fall and what we/they are not doing right. Is it normal to fall like this after the launch of a new site? They told us it would be a week or 2 and now we are on month 2.

Thanks for your time.

Best regards,
John

++Jill’s Response++

Hi John,

This is common with redesigns when you switch content management systems or otherwise change your URLs. You will often have to wait for some period for the search engines to remove your old URLs and index the new ones. Plus, they sometimes give less weight to new URLs that have no history (or previous link popularity).

However, then I took a quick glance at the site and noticed some disturbing things. I thought it would be a good idea to discuss them here so that others could learn what *not* to do on their own sites, especially as it seems to have had such a dramatically negative impact on the business.

The home page looked nice and professional at first glance; however, near the bottom of the page was a scrolling window with a ton of keyword-rich copy contained in it. Scrolling through that window revealed a ton of keyword-rich text links. Neither of these things are necessarily search engine spam in and of themselves, but because of the way they were integrated into the website, they certainly set off alarm bells in my head. Companies don’t bury great marketing copy that will help sell their products or services. They do that only when they don’t understand how to write for their users and search engines alike.

Even though this copy was technically visible (one could scroll the inner window and read it all) the search engines may very well consider it hidden text.

A quick peek at some of the pages in the “hidden” links revealed more problems for this site. The links were pointing to a slew of old-fashioned doorway pages, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the 1990s! Sure, they were a bit more sophisticated than the old 90s versions, as they were integrated into the site template. They could even be mistaken for real site pages when viewed individually; however, it was pretty much just “madlib spam.” In other words, all 20 or so pages said the same thing, only they switched out keyword phrases for other keyword phrases. They were poorly written and oftentimes simply gibberish.

[huge sigh]

It’s scary to know that there are still SEO companies out there creating this kind of junk. John declined to tell me who his SEO company is, so I don’t know if it’s a well-known firm or not. I don’t know what he paid for the pleasure of spamming the search engines either, but I hope it wasn’t much. He also just told me that due to their lack of a search engine presence in Google for the past few months, they’ve just had to lay someone off. Now, I don’t believe in relying on search engine rankings in order to successfully run your business, but when you think of the horrible impact a bad SEO company can have on a business, it’s frightening. I’m quite sure that one day in the not-too-distant future there will be lawsuits based on this kind of bad SEO. That won’t be good for any of us in the SEO industry.

John’s CEO is now aware of the problem and they’re cleaning up the mess. I suggested that he file a Google reinclusion request once they have removed the spam.

If anyone reading this provides this sort of SEO spam to clients, you really should be ashamed of yourself. … Being responsible for a company’s loss of business would not be a good feeling at all.

Jill

An interesting article reveals some spamming techniques used by Fortune 500 companies. It seems that some of them  use techniques that for lesser sites entail the very real risk of being banned from the search engines. There’s also a related forum thread with opinions from a number of search engine experts.

Brian Livingston recently reported, “If you come to work one morning and find that your company’s traffic from Google has fallen to nothing, a competitor may be redirecting traffic from your site to his. Amazingly, there may be little or nothing you can do to stop this blatant rip-off.” His full column is here.

Can Your Competitors Sabotage Your Search Engine Rankings?

Up until now, its always been thought that there was nothing a competitor could do to damage your rankings in the search engines, other than by making their site better and more relevant than yours. But it looks like the latest Google algorithm change has introduced a loophole that could allow an unscrupulous competitor to force your web site out of the Google listings altogether. Yikes!

Michael Pedone writes about this in SearchEngineWatch.com. He explains the loophole and offers some advice on what Google needs to do to correct the problem. He writes:

A small loophole has turned into a devastating black hole, sucking in and wiping out countless quality websites in the process. And it just may be their competitors sending them into the abyss.

Is your head spinning yet? I mean, it was bad enough knowing that with every Google update, your business may go up or down in the rankings depending on the whims of the Google geeks. But now add into the mix the fact that your competitors also have a hand in your search engine health and wellness … well, Houston, we have a problem.

Tricking search engines with techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages and other dodgy tricks might be tempting because it seems that you can save so much time and effort with them.

Be very careful with that. Search engines don’t like to be tricked. It compromises the accuracy and value of their results. You might get away with this for awhile but as soon as search engines find out that you’re tricking them, they will ban your site.