‘Spam’ or ‘SEO Indigestion’ - October 27th, 2006
Justsearch prides itself on being a natural search engine optimisation company which it duly lives up to but during the course of my work here I do come across sites which have been ‘optimised’ by other search engine optimisation companies whose techniques are anything but ‘natural’. Knowing how Google operates and how fast it responds to spam, it is always a safe bet to use natural search engine optimisation techniques to prove a long term success but as the proverb goes, to defeat the enemy one must know the enemy. In this spirit here is a selection of ‘unnatural’ techniques which are popular at the moment and which must be avoided at all costs.
Negative CSS
Additional content can be placed on a site but through the use of CSS can be positioned off screen so as not to affect the site’s design. Typical methods would be to set the margin to a minus figure maybe off to the left. As some CSS styled menus use this technique your site may get away with it for a short while but there’s every chance the site has been flagged for a human observer to investigate.
Hidden Text
This is a very common practice of placing text in the same colour as the background colour making it invisible to the human eye but readable by search engines. Again, this technique allows additional content to be placed on the site with out affecting design but Google is now clued up of this practice and once caught you can expect your site to be seriously devalued.
Script Tags
A very cunning technique is to set the attributes for additional text as hidden using html tags. For example, in a div you could set the style to ‘display:none’ or ‘visibility:hidden’. However, the tags are read by search engines and there’s every chance that the use of this technique will cause it to be flagged. Java script can hide div tags which is another commonly seen spamming technique and which too can be flagged by search engines.
Cloaking
It was noticed that certain search engine spiders derive from a predictable range of IP numbers. Using this knowledge, unnatural search engine optimisation companies have used IP detection to show a particular web page to search engines but another page to visitors. It is now pretty obvious that search engines have learned how to recognise this and severely devalue such sites.
Very Small Text
I must say that I have a healthy respect for the ingenuity of the aforementioned unnatural SEO techniques but the most blatant of spamming techniques is to make additional content extremely small. Sometimes the text looks like a solid line. It’s not difficult for Google to recognise that text below a certain font size is unreadable and flag the perpetrating website.
In conclusion, all of the above techniques have proved tempting enough for Search Engine Optimisation companies to employ but largely the websites have enjoyed a short lived success at best and usually lose their PR. If this has happened to your site, remove the cause immediately to begin the recovery process.
Justsearch optimise sites using ethical and proven techniques and can even help you if you have been the victim of ‘unnatural’ SEO.
