I Thought Florida was a State? - Cause
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With reported 100 million-plus searches per day, Google has become the main source of referrers (and in turn revenue) for an untold number of businesses. Very unfortunately - but expectedly - many scruple-lacking persons have taken up the profession of web spamming, finding ways to abuse Google, generating undeserved high SERP listings for their sites. They employ many devious methods, which you could information on without great difficulty. But of course, the researchers and developers at Google can just as easily locate this information, and thus take steps to counteract them. After all, nobody wants to be abused, regardless of what the Eurhythmics would have us believe!
I would like to explain a few “tricks” that have been used to exaggerate page-rank and search term relevancy, or generally boost the number of visitors to a given website. Just so you know in advance, Google hates these sneaky tricks, and as you’ll learn, using them at this point will no longer help you. The reason I’m pointing them out is to help you identify reasons why your site could perhaps be penalized by Google. Here we go:
Hidden text/links
Have you ever found a page listed in your Google results, but it really has nothing to do with what you’re looking for? And not only that, but the page seems a whole lot bigger than the content that’s presented, it looks like a large amount a blank space has accidentally been dropped onto the page! Well, this is no accident, and if you were to highlight it, you would see hidden text with the same or a very similar color to the background. Usually a bunch of gibberish, with the purpose of professing the page to be something it’s not.
Cloaking/Redirecting
Those frames that are only one pixel high, or an unexpected page-redirect, designed to take the user to somewhere that they just don’t want to be.
Automated Submission
I’m not quite sure how many thousands of applications and websites exist to automatically submit your site to ‘X’ number of search engines, but not even one of them will be of benefit to you. All they signify for the folks at Google is additional unwanted bandwidth and processing cycles to handle the automated queries. Google provides a simple tool to submit your site once, and only once, and they would really prefer that you use it.
Loaded Irrelevant Words
It is not the most difficult thing to obtain a list of popular search terms. I just wonder to whom first came the revolutionary idea of borrowing from that list. And I don’t blame Google for fighting this one, after all, who wants their 12 year old daughter stumbling onto an Adult website when innocently searching for Britney Spears?
Mirrored Sites
It seems that some have confused the real world concept of franchising to the virtual world of the web. The belief that having multiple sites with the same content, or perhaps just multiple domain names, for the purpose to attract more people, is frivolous. The result is redundant information. That just slows the world down. That’s just a bad idea.
Doorway Pages
I remember reading about this concept, and just feeling disappointment. Who wants to navigate to a page with one paragraph of purposefully pointed information, and then realize there is still further to go yet to get to the “real” site, the information that might be what you’re really looking for?! Not to mention that this grates on the very fiber of my being as a webmaster. I don’t want to mislead visitors. I don’t want to make them think they’ve done enough just searching for my site, and I’d like to reward them immediately. And naturally, I don’t want the hassle of building meaningless, extra, cookie-cutter pages.
Link Schemes
It is well known that the basic determinant in obtaining a greater page rank is having more sites linking to your own. Well then, why not just visit the guest books on a hundred different personal sites, and leave a note with the URL of your domain? Or perhaps join a link farm, a pointless site, containing only links to other sites? Ingenious, no? No, the only way to describe it is lazy.
Ok, so we’ve discussed a number of popular and dishonest search ranking schemes. These are some of the main driving forces behind the Florida update. The research, planning, and work has all been accomplished to all but eliminate the effectiveness of spammers.
The filter accomplished what it set out to do, but it seems it went above and beyond duty on this one. Read on to see how you may have been listed as a ‘blackhat’ unexpectedly by Google, as thousands have.
Next: Side-Effects and Suspicions >>
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