Great reviews at places like Google Local and Yelp can help your search engine rankings and encourage shoppers to buy your products or services. Is it any wonder, then, that some businesses have succumbed to the temptation of soliciting fake rave reviews? Of course not. And a mini-industry has appeared to satisfy that temptation.

5-Star Reviews

The more fake 5-star reviews that are handed out, the more you need to rise above the competition. It’s like an arms race in counterfeit superlatives.

The New York Times recently wrote about an attempt to deal with this.

Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.

Google?

I’m sure Google is working on this as well. In my opinion, trafficking in mendacious online reviews will come to bite you in the butt. Google is very unlikely to stop at disregarding the fake reviews it finds — more likely it will penalize the site employing such tactics. Back in 2006 we wrote about Ricoh and BMW cheating for higher rankings and getting completely banned from Google for more than six months.

We don’t know if Google has fake review detection in place, or how effective it is, but you can rest assured that they will develop a very effective system for it in the future. And when they do, a lot of websites will suffer for employing those dishonest tactics.

Your website can’t afford a serious Google slap-down.

Some may be tempted to create fake reviews to dampen the effect of a negative review that appears about their company online. Don’t. There are better ways to deal with negative reviews, though, some of which we discussed in this blog last year. If you feel you really need some good reviews to counter the bad press, ask your most delighted customers to give you a review — but make sure they do it in their own words.

One of our clients who has a medical practice in Windsor, CT has received a solicitation from one of those bogus SEO companies. They sent me information about that company’s “review” of my client’s SEO, and I couldn’t help but comment frankly. Here’s the story:

I did this website SEO overview for $10 with another company just to see things from a different perspective.  I have no intention of using them beyond the report attached.  It seems that my home page is lacking a bit.  I know that you made recommendations regarding my home page.  They ran the report just on my home page so that was what we focused on.  These are my questions that came up as a result:
1.  They said that the title tag was weak and that it should be a description of what I do rather than my business name and town.
[My reply] We’re optimizing that page for just your business name and town on purpose. If someone recommends you to a friend or relative, we want you to show up when they search for your business name. “What you do” covers too many things (and too many keywords) to cover on your home page; that’s why we optimized other pages for those keywords.
2.  They mentioned optimization maintenance of meta tags, which is I think what they were selling.  Not sure what was wrong regarding that.
[My reply] Meta tags are almost worthless for rankings, particularly the keywords meta tag. And the last thing they need is maintenance. You should only change well-written meta tags if the nature of your business changes and your keywords along with it. See this recent article about this sort of thing: … and this.
3.  They suggested that I had bad links or links that were draining energy from my resources page, although she could not give me an example of a broken link.
[My reply] Links do not drain energy from your pages. They share your linking page’s PageRank with the targets of those links, so if you have lots of outbound links each one you link to gets less value from the link than if you had fewer links on the page. But outbound links don’t hurt your “energy” one iota.
4.  Should I be doing some updating of either the content or meta tags as part of a regular maintenance?
[My reply] NO! That’s a scam perpetrated by sleazy SEO practitioners. You should update content on your site when it deserves to be updated — when you incorporate new techniques into your practice; when you react to new medical research, when you expand to treating other conditions … never just for the search engines. Please do this: go to Google and do a search for tutoring in New Jersey — see what comes up at the top of the organic results. Do you find A+ Home Tutoring? That’s my wife’s website, and it’s the first one I ever optimized. Back in 2000. Other than adding a single page for a new learning game she patented, this website hasn’t been touched in 11 years.

Sorry, I am sure that you roll your eyes about these companies just like I do when people go and get mall health screenings.  Thanks for your input.

[My reply] PS — I can’t believe they thought people would look for you by searching for the keyword “Windsor”. What are they? Stoopid? (Windsor is the town this client has an office in.)

And they make a big deal of your Keyword Efficiency Index? We abandoned using the KEI years ago.

Sorry to be so nasty about these guys, but these are the folks that give SEO a bad name and cause people to think it’s an unethical racket. They really push my buttons.

Matt Cutts (“The Google Guy”) spoke at an industry meeting a few months ago, and as reported by Search Engine Land, there was news in what he had to say. Here are the most important points to note, in our opinion:

• Spam reports now get 4 times as much priority as before in the spam queue at Google. If your competitors are using spammy SEO techniques, it can’t hurt to report them. (Your competitors can report you, too, of course, so remember to avoid black hat SEO tactics yourself.) And if you find really spammy web sites like link farms and MFA sites showing up for your keywords, by all means report them to Google.
• Users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He suggested you put your most important links at the top of the page. They may not count more for SEO purposes, but will help in driving visitors to click on the links, especially call-to-action links that encourage visitors to buy.
• Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at www.blue-widgets.com it may rank too well for the keyword phrase blue widgets. Expect the importance of keywords in your domain name to be reduced. We’ve always encouraged different criteria for choosing your domain name.
• When doing Keyword research, start with keywords your customer base is likely to use, and avoid industry jargon. The rule of thumb is called Ask 10 Taxi Drivers (meaning people NOT in the same business as yours).

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.

A few days ago, Google announced that they are going to fight search engine spam stronger than before:

“We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.

We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.”

What exactly is Google going to do? Could Google consider your website spam?

Axandra has an interesting article on this. Bottom LIne: If you have good content and good link popularity, you don’t need to worry. It’s also important to adhere to ethical SEO standards.

One of my clients forwarded the following email to me:

Good morning, my name is ***** and I am a [sic] Internet marketing professional. I had done [sic] a Google search under the keyword New Jersey Lawyer And had run across [sic] your website www.*****.com. I see that you are not listed on the first page of Google for your particular search.

I am not sure if you’re aware of why your [sic] ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.

There’s no reason that you can’t have top three rankings for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer based on your Website structure and content. You have a very nice site.

What you need is high quality one-way anchor text links. I can help you with this…..

Not only can I get you ranked for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer but I am talking about all of your keywords on top of Google. Adding new high quality PR anchor-text links from the highest quality websites will produce the results and business you want for http://www.*******.com.

The right kind of links are crucial in getting top ranking… and I can hand deliver these quality links to you.

My partners and I own 1000′s of websites and offer private linking to hundreds of website owners just like yourself.

I didn’t send this email out to very many people but I do favor your website because I can see your website monetizing the targeted website traffic for the keyword New Jersey Lawyer can deliver.

I have your contact information and phone number. Would it be okay if I were to give you a call?

I have a very simple way to prove to you that what I do works risk free for you to try. Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes.

Would it be okay if I were to give you a call? I would love to pursue this further over the phone with you or should I go somewhere else?.

Sincerely,
**** *****

P.S.- if the tables were turned and somebody I didn’t know came to me with  a proposition, even one that was appealing, I would be hesitant because I would be wondering – what’s the catch? What does this guy know that I don’t.

But then again I would think he does know something that I don’t know. He owns 1000′s of websites, he does have hundreds of thousands of pages indexed with top rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Websites that can deliver only the highest quality anchor-text links that can move your rankings fast. I would also think that I need to get my website in the top rankings. And he is offering turn key page 1 rankings on all of my keywords including New Jersey Lawyer. Keywords that produce the kind of traffic potentially worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars.

I emailed you this because it’s a win-win for both of us. Think of it this way, who wouldn’t be interested in buying money at a discount? Because that’s what I’ll be able to offer you….discount money.

Would it be okay to give you a call? Or you can call me anytime at the number above and would [sic] be happy to explain how I can benefit you risk free.

I was incensed enough to flame that guy back. As you can tell, he really pushed my buttons. Here’s what I wrote, with identities protected:

Xxxxx, [my client]  forwarded your email to me because I’m his SEO consultant. Let me object to your email on a several counts.

• Spamming is an abhorrent practice. Your email is the very definition of spam: unsolicited commercial email. It’s unethical and gives the rest of us who do SEO a bad reputation; I take personal offense. You should be ashamed of yourself.
• My client is a [practice area] lawyer. The keyword phrase you suggest is just plain stupid on three counts.
  • First, the percentage of people who search for a New Jersey lawyer who are actually looking for a [practice area] lawyer is very small. Many will be looking for a criminal defense lawyer, or a divorce lawyer, or a business litigation lawyer, or a real estate lawyer. It’s a poorly targeted keyword and suggests that maybe you don’t know what you’re doing.
  • Second, you misunderstand search behavior. Anyone looking for a lawyer who does what my client does and who searched for New Jersey lawyer would immediately recognize that the search results contained few if any lawyers of the type they’re seeking. They would immediately re-cast their search in more specific terms. Those more specific terms are the ones my client needs to be found under.
  • Third, I’m appalled that you’re one of those “over-promise and under-deliver” guys that also makes the rest of us look bad. To promise top three organic rankings for the phrase New Jersey lawyer in a short period of time for a small law firm is unrealistic, and as pointed out above, even that achievement would be of minimal value to my client. Promising top three organic listings for such a competitive phrase is, in my opinion, dishonest.
• Finally, you’re promoting a linking scheme where you offer one-way links from among thousands of web sites that you own. Google has written on their web site that such practices are considered search engine spam and will be penalized. Google treats these schemes as unethical SEO behavior.

I’ll be advising my client and others to treat your email as spam.

High Google rankings can bring lots of business to a web site. As a result, it’s tempting to try to fiddle with the system. Some forms of search engine optimization are acceptable, but others aren’t. One “black hat” technique, the use of a so-called doorway page, has apparently thrown BMW’s German language web site out of Google’s results altogether. <See coverage in Forbes>

Matt Cutts, the Google engineer famous for his blog discusses this incident along with the removal of a Ricoh web site for similar transgressions.

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.

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.

What did they do wrong?

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 Building

When 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.

A recent security threat report from Symantec reveals phishing attacks are up an astounding 366%. “By the end of December 2004, Symantec Brightmail AntiSpam antifraud filters were blocking an average of 33 million phishing attempts per week, up from an average of 9 million per week in July 2004.” Unfortunately, Symantec expects this trend to continue its increase.