Google Advertising Tools, 2nd Edition

Avoiding Overly Aggressive SEO

Google, like other major search engines, urges you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site.

Here’s why you should avoid being overly aggressive with SEO (besides wanting to avoid Google’s disapproval): building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of common sense; just build a site that will be useful or interesting to people, and it will naturally get indexed correctly, although this may take some time.

With this viewpoint, you shouldn’t concern yourself with search order ranking or SEO when you construct your site. Just create worthwhile content that is genuinely useful, interesting, or entertaining. However, at the same time you needn’t be naïve. It makes sense to deploy sites and pages in the most SEO-compliant way possible that doesn’t cross the line into deceptive behavior—or one of the constructions frowned upon by Google.

Note

SEO experts tend to disagree with this “build it with quality and they will come” theory of site creation. They point to the incredible competition for premium SEO results, and the money that is at stake, and suggest planning in advance for effective SEO with a knowledgeable expert.

Google’s Prohibitions

Following is a list of the techniques that Google considers bad behavior. Google prohibits these things because it considers them overaggressive and deceptive, but note that Google does not consider this list exhaustive and may penalize your site for anything new that you come up with if it is considered deceptive to either humans or the Googlebot, assuming it is discovered.

According to Google, good search engine citizen websites do not:

Employ hidden text or links

For example, users cannot read white text on a white background (and will never even know it is there), but this text will be parsed by the search engine. This rule comes down to making sure that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages

Also called stealth, this is a technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine than to the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way

It’s easy to redirect the user’s browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposes—for example, to make users think they are on a page associated with a well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer’s page—it’s frowned upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious schemes

Linking to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the Web may actually hurt your own PageRank (or search ranking), even if doing so provides inbound links to your site. (For information about how to legitimately encourage inbound site linking, and therefore improve your PageRank, see Chapter 3.)

Note

Bad neighborhoods are primarily link farms or link exchanges—sites that exist solely for the purpose of boosting a site’s inbound links without other content. Web spammers are sites that disguise themselves with pseudo-descriptions and fake keywords—the descriptions and keywords do not truly represent what the site contains.

Bombard Google with automated queries

This wastes Google’s bandwidth, so it doesn’t like it.

Practice keyword loading

This is the practice, beloved by some purported SEO “experts,” of adding irrelevant words to pages. (The page can then be served as the search result based on a query for the irrelevant words that actually don’t have anything to do with the page content.)

Create multiple similar pages

Google frowns on the creation of pages, domains, and subdomains that duplicate content.

Use cloaking or redirection

These techniques send a user to a page that has nothing to do with the one in the search engine results. (A variety of techniques may be used to substitute one page for another—either by redirection or actual substitution of pages on the web server—when the first page is optimized for specific keyword searches and the page to which the user is actually sent has little or nothing to do with that search.)

Create pages that lack content

Google frowns on pages that lack original content, such as a page that exists simply to present affiliate links.

Create domains with the intention of confusing users

It’s likely you’ve landed on a site with a domain name that’s confusing because it shares a name with a different domain suffix (for example, http://www.php.org, which combines a redirection with the deception, rather than the legitimate PHP language site, http://www.php.net) or because of a slight spelling variation (http://www.yahho.com rather than http://www.yahoo.com).

Publish advertising that is not clearly denoted as such

Paid advertisements and links are not in and of themselves evil, but graphically it should be clear to viewers what they are looking at. In addition, the Googlebot should be warned that it is looking at paid advertising through the use of the nofollow attribute in links within the ad.

Note

Paid advertising links should be marked with the nofollow attribute, but not all links marked in this way are advertisements.

The following code snippet contains a way to make the ad distinctive for humans (the adalt class formatting) and a nofollow attribute to make the paid nature of the link clear to bots as well:

<p class="ad adalt"><small>Please buy widgets from <a rel="nofollow"
href="http://www.advertiser.com/">this advertiser</a>. Thanks!</small></p>

A Nefarious Domain Spamming Example

A really egregious example of the nefarious practice of domain spamming is Org.com. Org.com is a link farm that takes advantage of the fact that if you enter the body of an address in the address bar of Internet Explorer and hit Ctrl + Enter, you are taken to the .com domain related to what you entered. For example, if you enter “google” in the IE address bar, and press Ctrl + Enter, http://www.google.com opens. So suppose, by mistake, you enter anything followed by .org in the address bar—for example, “www.w3.org”, expecting to open the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) site—and press Ctrl + Enter. Instead of W3C, http://www.w3c.org.com—in other words, Org.com (and its link menu)—will open.

Google frowns on deceptive domain naming if the domain name was selected for the purpose of taking advantage of the confusion.

As Google puts it, spending your energy creating a good user experience will let you “enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.”

Warning

If you are a webmaster, you’ve likely been approached to pay for SEO services. While there are many reputable and effective SEO consultants, there are also a fair number of scam artists. Remember: if something seems too good to be true, it likely is.

Why Not to Be Overly Aggressive

If you draw Google’s attention for practicing dirty tricks, you can get expelled from Google’s index altogether. Worse, there’s effectively no way to appeal a Google decision to expel a site from its index. Nor is there a set of procedural safeguards for webmasters who feel they have been wrongfully accused of deceitful SEO practices. It’s therefore safest to avoid the wrath of Google by avoiding anything that even smacks of deceit.

Note

You can appeal for reconsideration from Google at the form found at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration, but there’s no guarantee that Google will respond to your request, or when it will do so.

Most dirty SEO tricks are also simply bad web design. If you put sites together using bad practices that are intended solely to optimize your sites, most often you’ll just irritate visitors—and get less traffic.

Google and other major search engines urge you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site. Google has actually taken the trouble to spell out SEO practices it regards as naughty (the list can be found at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769). You should pay attention to this list as if it speaks the mind of every major search engine, not just Google. Google’s position that building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of providing useful content isn’t totally off-the-wall, although it assumes a world where everything always works.