ireckon blog

The potential costs of SEO Ignorance

Posted by: Andy on 17 Apr 2008 @ 9:41 pm Category: Search Engine Optimisation

I recently attended a world class Search Marketing conference in Sydney and was very fortunate to have the opportunity to meet up with some of the international "stars" of Search Engine Marketing. People like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin and Gord Hotchkiss - along with some of the "influencers" in the industry from Google and Microsoft.

Australia has long been considered by some to be a "Wild West" of the SEO world - largely because the SEM market Downunder is relatively immature in comparison to the US or even UK markets. It wasn't so long ago, that simply having a website in Australia was enough to be found on page one on search engine results. These days website owners are recognising that to rank well, and to compete for page 1 positions, optimisation is critical.

One of the final sessions at the conference involved Danny and Rand reviewing a couple of websites with a plan to offer advice as to how they could be better optimised. As a part of the analysis Danny & Rand (very entertainingly) stumbled across a third party site that was using a very "Wild West" technique known as "cloaking". Cloaking involves providing different content to search engine spiders, than that which is served to the normal site visitor (via a browser).

Cloaking is a technique frowned upon by Google (and other search engines) and clearly warned against in their webmaster guidelines. Unfortunately for this particular site, Adam Lasnik (from the Google anti spam team), happened to also be on the panel for this session - the whole subdomain was delisted, and disappeared completely from Google search result listings within 24 hrs.

Using spammy (or black hat) techniques is unfortunately not that unusual, but what is particularly scary about this case, is that the site in question belongs to one of Australia’s most well recognised brands. This begs the question - Why would such a well known company use such a dodgy technique ? I think that the answer to this is pretty straightforward - simple ignorance.

I don't believe that the company intentionally set out to deceive the search engines. There was actually some logic behind what they were trying to achieve - the page was largely image based, and the cloaked content was simply text that appeared within the images. However, the technique they (or more accurately their technical advisers) chose to use, happened to conflict with Google’s page guidelines. Given the very public forum that "outed" the site, Google had little choice but to take action.

I've subsequently done a little detective work - and have identified a whole swag of other sites and pages using the exact same ill conceived idea. I believe that the high profile delisting, has probably given many of these sites a wakeup call, and they are scrambling to try and resolve the problem - before they too are delisted.

Ireckon we see Education as a very important part in our role as Professional Search Engine Optimisers. Teaching our clients the best way to optimise their sites, as well as why they should do it is important.

This event has highlighted to me, that knowing what to do is maybe not enough. Knowing what not to do may be just as important - particularly for business owners who are self taught or are following the technical advice of so-called specialists.

I have therefore decided to publish a series of posts describing some of the more common spammy or "black hat" optimisation techniques. Some of these techniques may have had some positive impact in rankings in the past - but these days are more likely to result in pages or even entire sites being "banned".

In this series I intend providing an overview of these techniques - what they are trying to achieve - how to identify them - but not necessarily how to apply them. Initially I intend covering some of the more blatant black hat tricks such as - Hidden Text, Keyword Stuffing, Doorway Pages, Link Farming, and of course Cloaking. If there are any specific techniques you would like me to include, please leave a comment.

 

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