Unethical Methods for Better Website Ranking

As search engines operate in a highly automated way it is often possible for webmasters to use methods and tactics not approved by search engines to gain better ranking. These “unethical” methods often go unnoticed unless an employee from the search engine manually visits the site and notices the activity, or a change in ranking algorithm causes the site to lose the advantage they gained.

 So-called "unethical" methods may include:

§ Keyword spamming (or keyword stuffing) which involves the insertion of hidden, random text on a web page to raise the keyword density or ratio of keywords to other words on the page.

§ Spamdexing is the promotion of irrelevant, chiefly commercial, pages through abuse of the search algorithms. Now this can be controversial, because many search engine administrators consider any form of SEO used to improve a website's page rank as spamdexing.

§ Cloaking refers to any of several means to serve up a different page to the search-engine spider than will be seen by human users. It can be an attempt to mislead search engines regarding the content on a particular web site. However, cloaking can also be used to ethically increase accessibility of a site to users with disabilities, or to provide human users with content that search engines aren't able to process or parse. It is also used to deliver content based on a user's location; they Google themselves using IP delivery, which is a form of cloaking, to get results.

§ Link Spam is the placing or solicitation of links randomly on other sites, placing a desired keyword into the hyperlinked text of the inbound link.

The following techniques are also widely acknowledged as being spam, or "black hat”:

· Mirror sites

· Doorway Pages

· Link Farms

· Googleating

Some SEOs argue that the terms ethical and unethical should not be applied to the work they do. They maintain that on the principle of basic freedom everybody should be free to post whatever they choose on a site they own, as long as they stay within the law.

Comments

[Terry Mickelson]

While I understand the search engines and the publics desire to keep the garbage out, it is the job of the search marketing expert to get a clients site ranked as high as possible. I know few webmasters running their own sites that would not do virtually what ever it takes to get ranked high for specific keywords. They know that’s where the money is.

That said, I think it is a foolish company that allows black hat techniques to be used on their main domain. If you are going to use "unethical" tactics, then make sure they are done on a throw away domain that won't hurt the company brand if you get caught.

[lisa]

Not only are there obvious black hat techniques that can get your site banned, there are lesser know mistakes made in websites that can also cause trouble with search engines. I call these mistakes, because many web owners do not know that these things could be costing them rankings. One of these mistakes is duplicate content. For branding purposes, a website owner may purchase several different versions of a url. The problem occurs when each of the urls is loaded with the same exact site. In the eyes of the search engines, this is a spamming technique...copying the same info and repeating it over and over. A good solution is to create different copy on the other sites. Change things around. Or, if you must have the urls, and do not have the ability to make each site unique, try a 301 redirect to the main and oldest url. That way, you can keep your urls, but all the links and pagerank are associated with one url. Duplicate contect can get your site banned, or cost you pagerank and rankings.
Another thing that looks spammy to search engines is having the same meta tag on every page of the site. Once again, the spam factor is repeating the same keywords over and over. It is best for search engine visibility to change up each meta tag to reflect the content on each page. A meta tag is only really effective if there is content on the page that matches. Simple things like this can help get you ranked higher in the search engines and stop any possible bans or reduced visibility.