Article on SEO Ethics | Mr Marketology

As competition continues to tighten for search engine rankings a number of unethical practices have emerged which can result in severe penalties for your site if it is determined to be engaged, even unwittingly, in what search engines consider to be spamming or illegal activity to acquire higher rankings.

Search engine optimization is the most popular way to attract website traffic and competition for the top rankings has become more and more aggressive. Tactics keep emerging to “trick” or “fool” search engine algorithms to favor one site over all others for a specific keyword or keyword phrase. This type of evolution is an expected development and many search engines including Google and Yahoo! have worked hard to stay on top of the many workarounds created to “fool” the natural search ranking process. Because some forms of illegal activity are quite subtle your website may be engaged in one or more of these illegal forms of seo without being aware of any infringement. If that is the case your site could be at risk of being penalized by search engines as a result.

In this new competitive environment it is critical that you stay informed about ethical SEO practices. Do you know which marketing tactics are considered spamming or spamdexing? As a business owner your advertising goal is to provide the most relevant information about your business and products to your target audience. In the same way a search engine strives to provide their customer’s with the most accurate and relevant search results based on the search criteria entered. If you, or any agent acting on your behalf uses a marketing tactic that compromises or degrades the integrity and relevance of a search engine’s results it is considered “spamming” or “spamdexing”.

So, exactly which marketing tactics are considered as spamdexing?

• Targeting keywords that are not directly related to your site content.

• Keyword stuffing: When you have too many occurrences of a keyword phrase on a page it can cause a problem. Too many repetitions of a keyword phrase may constitute overuse. An accepted formula for determining “overuse” is the number of times the keyword or keyword phrase appears within 200 words of content on a page. If a keyword phrase appears more than six or seven times this could be considered a questionable marketing tactic and be subject to penalty. Keyword stuffing is also the practice of including or repeating an unrelated content keyword in parts of the web page that are not visible to a person viewing the web page in a browser. This would include areas such the the Keywords meta tag and the HTML comments tag.
• Exceeding submission limits: You should not submit your site or individual pages from it more than once. Repeated submissions may result in your site being red flagged for a penalty by the major search engines.

• Page swapping or page jacking: These practices include copying another sites high ranking page and placing it on your own site to gain a higher ranking and then swapping it out for your own page after your site has increased its ranking. It can also be done by using one of your own optimized pages and swapping it out for a different page once your site has advanced its ranking. Both self-borrowing or stealing directly from a competitors site are cause for penalty.

• Vanity Domains (Mirror Sites): Spamdexing occurs when you register multiple domain names on multiple servers that utilize the exact same content as your official domain. A variation of this is to vary the content slightly but optimize the same keywords on each site to increase search engine rankings by domination of keywords and keyword phrases.

• Doorway Pages and Deceptive Redirects: A doorway page is optimized for one keyword phrase but has no related content on the page. A doorway page is used to achieve high rankings on one keyword phrase and then redirects the user to another page that has virtually nothing to do with the keyword that was searched. Doorway pages may have an automatic refresh (deceptive redirect) to a second website.

• Duplicated Link Pages and Link “Farms”: Other websites that point back to your web site help search engines evaluate how relevant your domain content is for a specific search term. Some people use a link farm to help boost their link popularity stats. A link farm is a web page designed specifically to link to a large number of sites. The practice of duplicating one or more web pages with a link pointing back to their main site and placing these pages on many different domains are also regarded as illegal ways of increasing a web site’s ratings and popularity..

• Misleading Content: If you decide to optimize meta tags and title tags with keyword phrases that do not correspond to the content on your site to attract traffic searching for a related keyword this is considered to be a form of spamdexing and keyword stuffing. You have probably encountered this form of misconduct. It happens frequently. You search “diabetic foods” and you get a web page that is about pharmeceuticals. It may mention diabetic foods or it may not, but somewhere the page or site has been optimized to the keyword phrase “diabetic foods”.

• Hidden Text: This is a tactic where text is placed on a page that is the same color as the background. This causes the text to be camouflaged or hidden from a visitor’s view. Remember that spiders only read text. So, even though a person cannot see the text the spiders and bots can read that camoflauged text. The spiders use the hidden keywords when determining the indexing and ranking of the page. Therefore, this is clearly a way of attempting to “fool” the spiders and is an unethical marketing tactic
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• Cloaking: It is unethical to use a script to detect a search engine’s spider by IP address in order to serve it a different page than the page it should see. Conversely, when a searcher clicks on the ranked result the same script is used to identify that the searcher is not a spider and the searcher is then redirected to a different landing page for the site which was not the page indexed by the spider. See page swapping for additional information.

You work hard to develop a trustworthy and respected brand image for you company. You don’t want to be penalized for unethical marketing tactics. It can quickly destroy the integrity of your company as well as the integrity and ranking of your site. We strongly recommend you consider using an online marketing consulting company. Do your homework and commit to partnering with an ethical online marketing firm. Your company reputation and success may well depend on it. As marketing becomes ever more competitive and aggressive you need seasoned experts who are paid to educate themselves on emerging trends and issues within the industry to guide and advise you. Don’t wait until it is too late to avoid a penalty or save your reputation.

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