Recently in our seminars we’ve seen a number of websites that have purposefully broken search engine rules for SEO. We all know that unscrupulous webmasters, developers and SEOs use tricks to make search engines think that their pages are more relevant than they really are. No laws are broken, so you won’t be looking at a prison sentence, but these unethical practices could see your website kicked out of the search engine rankings, and if you rely on search engine traffic to keep your business alive, this could be financially crippling.
The worrying thing is that in many cases, website owners are not aware that their SEO company is employing these underhand tactics – but guess who gets lumbered with the penalised website when things go wrong?

The worst thing about this is that it is not obvious to the naked eye. The majority of these unethical (known in the industry as “black hat”) SEO practises often do not change the way a page appears to the visitor. It’s only when you look under the bonnet that you see some bad examples of black hat SEO.  And it’s not just little sites that get caught red handed – in the past Google Germany has punished both BMW and Ricoh for using dodgy tactics to win the search engine war.  Here’s a list of some of the common tricks to watch out for. If your developers or SEO company seem to be employing these tactics, you’ll want to consider a change: the rewards can be great, but if you’re caught, you’re in for a world of search engine pain.

This one is actually really obvious, and most of us will have seen something along these lines in our day to day browsing. It’s when a page’s copy has been so stuffed with keywords that it reads terribly. If you’ve ever seen a page that reads something like:

Our cheap villas in France are some of the best cheap villas in France you’ve ever seen. Most cheap villas in France contain a couple of small rooms, but our cheap villas in France have 6 bedrooms…

…then you’ll know exactly why this thing should be avoided. Even if Google somehow manages to miss this with their algorithm, there’s no way anyone is going to want to buy from you if your copy reads in this contrived way.

Some SEOs get around this turn off for visitors by stuffing text and then hiding it on the web page. The trouble is that Google doesn’t like this – it states that search engines spiders and people should see exactly the same content when browsing your website.

Common ways of trying to hide text are to make it the same colour as the background or to hide it behind an image. Google is wise to these, and you will get found out eventually.

Here’s a text illustration of how this could look in real life.
First a normal web page through human eyes:

Now, if your SEO company is doing things the right way, then this is how a search engine emulator (think of it as Google Goggles!) sees things:

But what if they’re up to their ears in invisible text?

Getting extra keywords is the reason why people try to hide text, but in our seminars we’ve recently seen examples of SEOs putting hidden links on their clients’ pages without their knowledge in the hopes of boosting their less reputable interests – often the notoriously iffy porn, gambling and piracy websites. This is double trouble – if Google sees you breaking the rules, it’s one thing, but linking to spammy sites will often see you flagged up as spam too!

Websites can tell the difference between search engine spiders and human visitors, so it’s possible to show search engine spiders one version of a page, while human visitors see a completely different version of the same page.  This is harder for search engines to detect, but you’re bang to rights if spotted, and search engines do not take kindly to this one as it means you can direct visitors to a page completely unrelated to a customer’s search terms.

Despite Google having cracked down on them, doorway pages are still fairly common. Simply put, doorway pages are pages created for the sole purpose of ranking well in the search engines for one keyword, without actually having any readable content of their own. These spammy, usually keyword-stuffed pages will automatically redirect into a ‘real page’ which has not been optimised and would not rank under its own merits. The consequence of this is that if the doorway page leaves the search engine listings, then so does the traffic to the ‘real pages’.

While all of these methods can provide short term boosts in rankings, they’re not recommended. The prizes can be great, but the fall can be far, far worse. For the above reasons, and more, at LeadGenerators we advocate White Hat SEO as the only sensible approach to healthy, long-term success in the search engine rankings.