Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition

Chapter 9

Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap

In This Chapter

Examining the principles of tricking search engines

Exploring the basic techniques

Looking at doorway pages, redirects, cloaking, and more

Understanding how you may be penalized

Everyone wants to fool the search engines — and the search engines know it. That’s why search engine optimization is such a strange business — a hybrid of technology and, oh, I dunno . . . industrial espionage, perhaps? Search engines don’t want you to know exactly how they rank pages because if you did, you would know exactly how to trick them into giving you top positions.

Now for a bit of history. When this whole search engine business started out, search engines just wanted people to follow some basic guidelines — make the Web site readable, provide a <TITLE> tag, provide a few keywords related to the page’s subject matter, and so on — and then the search engines would take it from there.

What happened, though, is that Web sites started jostling for position. For example, although the KEYWORDS meta tag seemed like a great idea, so many people misused ...