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.
RankAttack is a new “black hat” search engine optimization tool that claims to get top search engine rankings quickly and with little or no effort. They claim:
“RankAttack Technology is one of the most aggressive SEO packages available. It does not use traditional technology nor does it follow the typical procedures outlined under standard SEO concept. RankAttack is different then anything you have ever seen. This technology is brand new and the engines are not ready for the effect it will have on the SEO industry. If you are actively seeking to compete for placement on the search engines — you need this program in your toolbox.”
[from their web site]
Ethical SEO practitioners will know just from the above that these techniques do not comply with search engine terms of service. That means if you use these techniques and the search engines catch on, woe is you!
Here are a few places on the web that have been covering this story since the first of the month:
CJK CyberMedia.com
SEO Chat Forum
Matt Cutts Blog on Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Until recently, large SEO firm SEOinc consistently ranked among the top two or three sites in Google for keywords like “search engine optimization” and “search engine positioning”. About a month ago, they suddenly vanished from the top 30, and they’re still not found today.
According to Threadwatch and StepForth, Google got wise to their link-spamming strategies. According to Stepforth:
SEOinc had recently been embroiled in a link-trading controversy that started when a third party link-vendor sent several competing SEO/SEM firms a spam-email asking them to provide a link to SEOinc on their sites in exchange for a link to their sites from another, unnamed website. Aside from being a particularly un-tempting offer, many in the SEO community saw it as proof of what are perceived to be blatant link-spamming techniques designed to game Google’s rankings. SEOinc currently has 24,900 backlinks recognized by Google. By comparison, SubmitExpress, the number one listing under “search engine optimization” only has 4,580 backlinks recognized by Google.
This is exactly why we recommend (and practice) ethical link building efforts.
TIP
Ethical Link BuildingWhen seeking links, always approach reputable web sites that are somehow related to yours. Explain to the web site owner how a link from their site to yours adds value for their visitors. Their site will be more valuable to someone visiting it because of the link from them to you. As long as that’s true, most web sites will link to you. And many will do so without requesting that you link back to them. This is sometimes called “organic link building”, and those links to you are there because the web site doing the linking thinks that you have a good and valuable web site. That’s exactly the kind of link the search engines love.
When you choose a web hosting company, you don’t expect that they are going to change your web pages. You also don’t expect that they change your web pages for their own benefit. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what some web hosts seem to do.
These web hosting companies change your web pages when a search engine spider requests them. For example, if Googlebot visits your web pages, the web host will return a different web page than the web page that is returned when a normal web surfer visits your web pages (a technique with the name cloaking).
The changed web pages contain links to the web host web site so that the link popularity of the web host site is improved. In addition, the web host creates new page and complete sub directories full of links on your web site.
Note that these changed URLs and the new pages cannot be seen by you. The URLs are not static and you cannot see them with your FTP client. Only search engine spiders can see the changed web pages because the web host intercepts the requests and dynamically creates the pages.
Some hosts also seem to add links to some of their clients on your web pages. They do this to artificially improve the link popularity of their clients’ sites. If you see any Secret backdoor to Google offers from your web host without further details, you should be skeptical. If a web host changes the web sites of other people, it is likely that they will also change your web site.
Go to Google, search for your domain name and click on the “Cached” link next to the results. You’ll see the web page that Google has indexed there. If the web page in the Google page has links to other web pages that you don’t know, chances are that your web host has changed your pages. In that case, you should contact your web host or Google so that the problem can be solved.
Web hosting companies with ethical business standards don’t use these techniques. If you find out that your web host changes your pages, you should consider a new hosting company.
Tip / Warning:
If Google finds out that your web site uses cloaking, you will get into trouble, even if the cloaking has been done by your web host and not by you.
