Seo Target
Google is secretive about its ranking algorithms. They are a complex mixture of over two hundred carefully weighted signals that contribute to deciding where on the search engine results pages a particular page appears.
People don’t like complexity and secrecy, especially when their income depends on the information that’s hidden. They yearn for quick and simple solutions, and so naturally there arises a group who will sell them spurious peace of mind. In our industry, that place is occupied by the bad SEO, who promises a quick-fix ride to the top of the SERPs, often employing many of the methods we’re about to discuss. No SEO worth his salt is going to rely on these techniques, or promise an easy and simple solution to the problem of ranking well.
These techniques might have worked before. But now they are useless. Or, they will damage a site’s ranking long-term. This is because they don’t improve SEO. Or, the search engines will penalize the site.
Often, Google doesn’t penalize sites that use these strategies. However, they frequently ignore those links. For sites, this means they invested a lot of money in SEO. And that SEO brings no benefit.
Forum and Comment Spam
These are both types of link spam. Link-building is a legitimate part of inbound marketing and SEO, but not all links are of equal value.
Google looks for a ‘natural’ link profile. This means it wants to see a mix of different kinds of links. However, if Google finds that many links come from low-value spam forums and blogs, a site’s ranking might drop. To address this, Google recently introduced a link disavowal tool. Therefore, sites that suspect many low-quality links are causing poor ranking can use it.
In an effort to discourage link spam, many blogs and forums now use the ‘nofollow’ attribute in their links to signal to the search engine crawlers that they should not take such links into consideration. They pass no PageRank to their target sites, which means they carry no direct SEO benefit (although comment and forum links can drive traffic, and they can lead to greater awareness that may result in other links.)
Keyword Stuffing and Title Stacking
Keyword stuffing is an old technique. It tries to attract searchers using specific words or phrases. People do this by repeating words and phrases a lot on a site. This often makes the site hard for people to read. Google’s Penguin update partly aimed to stop this. Google wants to promote only good content. This content should be interesting and helpful for its users.
Title stacking is similar. The titles on a page are used by search engines as a strong signal to indicate its subject. Title stacking involves having multiple titles using different or variant keywords in the hope of attracting search traffic.
Article Spinning and Duplicate Content
Content can be expensive to produce, so it’s tempting to use the same content on multiple pages (or take it from another site). Google will ignore duplicate content, choosing only one of the duplicates to be the ‘canonical’ page.
Spinning content is an attempt to get around the prohibition on duplicate content by slightly changing it. Content creators or software will shift around sentences and paragraphs or replace words with synonyms to disguise that it’s a duplicate. Google is quite good at spotting spun content, so it’s often going to be detrimental to a site.
However, there is a continuum, and completely rewriting someone else’s content is unlikely to be spotted.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are a sneaky attempt to attract searchers. They target specific keywords. Then, they redirect searchers to another page. This other page often has unrelated content. A doorway page is not the same as a landing page. Landing pages offer useful content to searchers. However, doorway pages only exist to deceive search engines. Google strongly disapprove of doorway pages for the same reason they dislike cloaking, which we’ll discuss next.
Cloaking
Cloaking is related to doorways pages, in that both show different content to site visitors than to search engines. Rather than using redirects, cloaking usually uses server-side scripts to send different pages to search engine crawlers and human visitors, as determined by the client’s user-agent. This is against Google’s terms of service. Search engines cannot function if sites show their bots different content. If Google discovers that a site uses cloaking it will be penalized, and perhaps removed from the index.
SEO is a legitimate enterprise that can greatly boost a site’s traffic. But, the techniques we’ve talked about here, though tempting, will, in the long run, be harmful to a site’s reputation and ranking.
