Search Engine Optimization to the Limit
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Learn advanced techniques for optimizing your website without incurring penalties from Google. Moderation is the key to using methods one person may consider as optimizing and another may consider as spam.
Most professional search engine optimizers know how to obtain high rankings in Google using tricks that break Google's inclusion guidelines. Testing methods is important, and ‘throwaway’ domains are often used for testing purposes. If a professional search engine optimizer does not know how far he/she can go before incurring a penalty, they are not going to be able to optimize a website to the maximum possible. There are terms like ‘black hat seo’ that you see being referred to on various forums and articles which describe search engine spamming methodology. It is not, however, a clear black and white (hat) issue and I personally don’t like the term black or white hat because often the definitions are not clear cut or even agreed upon among the SEO community.
There are many legitimate uses for much of the SEO methodology listed as ‘no-nos’ on the Google guidelines. This is probably why Google calls them guidelines and not conditions for inclusion.
There are many so-called gray methods of optimization which many webmasters, having read the Google guidelines, automatically discount trying for fear of penalization. Of course, most bending and out-and-out breaking of the Google guidelines are carried out with the sole purpose to manipulate Google, often in a crass manner such as literally thousands of doorway pages that automatically redirect or hiding text through one of the many different methods.
There are some forms of cloaking (providing the Google spider with different highly optimized content than a human with a browser would see) that Google would and does encourage (if it wasn’t so open to abuse). Other methods involve manipulation of HTML tags with css, javascript redirection, url rewriting, creating near identical pages, using css layers, etc.
I have used most of the above on my own website and do not fear penalization. Why am I not worried I might be penalized by Google? The reason is because my content is exactly the same for a human visitor as it would be for a search engine spider and no attempt to dupe Google through hidden content or redirection takes place. Also, there may be a legitimate design reason, for example. I actually help Google by providing new pages for indexing and make my own (and clients') sites much more spiderable/indexable.
One search engine's optimizers advanced techniques is another’s spam. There is unlikely to ever be a full consensus on what is or is not an acceptable search engine optimization technique. What you need to do is simply to ask yourself, am I trying to dupe Google here? If a competitor reported my page for spamming, could I sleep at night in the knowledge that the site would not be penalized? The important part is intent. Are you helping the search engines or manipulating them?
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