Isn’t SEO Really Just Search Spam?
There is much controversy about the techniques and practices involved in SEO Strategy due to the Can-Spam Act and vast amounts of spammers in the web community. This article is written to address the differences in ethical search engine optimization strategy and what we call “spam”.
There are many similarities in the user-experience of SEO results and Spam results when it comes to delivery. Ethical marketer will also use email marketing, pop-up’s, toolbar downloads, and other techniques seen in spam. The major difference in the two is simple…intent. While spammers are intent on delivering their unsolicited message to a random audience who may or MAY NOT have a desire to read it, an ethical SEO will use proper tactics to target a market that actually “seeks the information being provided”. Whether the invitation be a subscription to a newsletter, a sign up form, or by optimizing keywords which are most likely to connect the user with their desired product or service. That is ethical SEO and that, in my opinion, is the only thing to be considered SEO at all.
The problem with ethical SEO in the eyes of search engines themselves is simple. The search engines make money from Pay-Per-Click ads and aren’t all that happy with a group of marketers taking part of their market share by utilizing the system they have created, even if their use is of value to the system itself, they still remove value from the products that the search engines offer.
As an SEO, I have found it to be one of internet marketing’s greatest errors to trust the search engines. The search engines, for the most part, have become filled with greed from the billions of dollars in annual revenues generated by Pay-Per-Click ads. Although, their search model does provide a valuable service to the internet community, the algorithm still exists and it is imperative for ethical Search Engine Strategists to balance the search engine results.
“The absence of good intent leaves bad intent a victor”
Here are the Top 5 activities that I would consider spam activities and we will never include any spam techniques in any of our software, SEO programs, designs, etc. We are 100% ethical and organic in all our practices:
Inbound Links
The use of paid links, link farms (pages with over 100 outbound links), irrelevant provider sites, and more can cause this link to be of little to no value and, in some cases, even cause Google to penalize the link recipient.
Cloaking and Stealthing
Cloaking is the practice of having hidden text written into the website to manipulate the search engine’s software. Google has caught on to these techniques. Cloaking includes using 1 pixel images with keyword-stuffed alt tags (the text that displays to people using text only browsers like the blind), Using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to alter display tags and styles, or having a text font the same color as its background. Anything that fools the search engine’s software into believing something is genuine content and is not. This practice will ultimately be discovered and blacklist your site from Google and other major search engines so don’t try it!
Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are great and are the backbone of any SEO campaign. Good keyword research using trusted tools and search queries made for the correct end-user to find your site are even better. What you don’t want to be doing is the repetitive use of keywords to improve ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords or keyphrases. Search engine algorithms can distinguish websites that are stuffed full of keywords and those that are organically created, hence the phrase organic SEO. Search engines are developing all the time to give weight to things like stop words (if, and, was, this, etc) in a way that measures the ratios of these words in the context of the page body to determine overall keyword rich content.
An important thing to note is that search engines also produce results based on the context of a webpage rather than simply displaying the literal meaning of individual content itself, including the structure of the sentences, organization of the text, use of stop words, typos, synonyms and antonyms, etc. Google has been a leader in this ability. Proper search engine optimizing and web copywriting involves writings that are composed in a keyword rich manner, using synonyms and antonyms where appropriate while making sure the content is written in a natural structure for the users of the website.
Doorway and Landing Pages
An early form of Black Hat tactics is the use of doorway pages, also known as dummy pages, gateway pages or portal pages. Doorway pages use a form of site cloaking that, when clicked on from the search results, the visitor is sent through a redirect process to a different page than what the search engine expected. This can be accomplished through a variety of means, most commonly using the http header (not html ), JavaScript, or other means of server-side redirection.
Doorway pages are different from landing pages in one main way. Landing pages contain fresh and unique content that is healthy for the search engines and produces positive and organic results.
File Cataloging Issues
Although this not typical behavior, catalog errors can cause your website to upset the search engines. You can see if your site has this problem by checking to see if you can access the site using a variety of URL’s such as http://www.yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com, without redirecting to a single domain. Essentially catalog errors can cause search engines to catalog two different websites and thus, leaving you with duplicate content problems! To correct this issue, you should redirect all extra URL’s to a single URL using a 301 redirect in the .htacces file or with your cPanel options. If you don’t have an .htaccess file simply open notepad and save a file as .htaccess. It is important to note that nothing goes before the dot in .htaccess for the filr to work properly. Now upload it to your server and it’s done.
Organic SEO are the only Techniques that Last
There are vast amounts of spamdexing tactics that can be used if you want to hurt yourself in the end. Many of those who use Black Hat SEO are doing so without being aware of what they are doing. This does not limit those webmasters that see so much greed that they are always coming up with unethical techniques or new “search spam” in the chase for the fastest dollar, but this will generally lead to their demise without resolve. If you do your SEO work ethical and organically you will harvest lasting results and consistent traffic, whereas, if you Spam the Engines you will have quick success followed by a fast and embarrassing demise…