Bad SEO Tricks Explained
Many people looking for a web designer for their website will eventually come across the letters: “SEO”. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is often treated as “black magic” and often marketed as a “miracle elixir.” Real SEO is closer to a list of do’s and don’ts that should be considered and implemented to help search engines see and understand your site to the best of their ability.
The best protection from Bad SEO Firms that push SEO like Snake Oil is education. There has been a push from the web design community to educate and protect our customers before a bad SEO firm has a change to ruin their site’s search engine reputation in exchange for a quick buck.
Eric Enge wrote a great article called: 11 Ways to Recognize a Bad SEO Firm. Please give it a quick read and then return to this article.
Eric’s article gives some great tips for spotting SEO Snake Oil. I’d like to go through his points and give a little more in-depth explanation of the technical terms used in each of the items for the benefit of those who are not familiar with the web and the web’s terminology.
1. Eric’s first way to spot a bad SEO firm is to see if they focus a lot of energy on “meta keywords.”
What are “meta keywords”? First, let’s talk about the word “meta”. All HTML documents have the ability to define extra data for describing the page by using the “meta” tag. This extra data is not obviously viewable on the page when using your web browser, but it’s there just in case it can help. Some standard items are things like a description of the page, an author’s name, the name of the program that was used to create the page, and keywords. That’s right, “keywords” are a standard type of extra data that is tagged onto a page using the “meta” tag.
The point of defining “keywords” with the “meta” tag is very straight forward. It allows the person who created the page to give a list of keywords that will help tell search engines what’s on the page. The problem is, people lie. So many pages have keywords listed that have nothing to do with what’s actually on the page. As a result, some search engines may just ignore the meta keywords in favor of trying to pick their own keywords and phrases out of the text that’s actually on the page. What’s worse is that some search engines may actually compare your page’s meta keywords against the actual content on the page. If they don’t match up, they assume you’re trying to trick them and may resolve to rank your page lower or not at all.
Meta keywords are not useless, but they are most certainly not the end-all be-all. They are a tool that was abused and now search engines consider that when they come across meta keywords.
2. Eric notes that Bad SEO firms will offer to do a lot of search engine submissions for you.
Search engines find web sites –that’s what they do. They do most of it by association. For example, when a search engine’s robots crawl through my site, they will find this article and they will, in turn, find a link to Eric Enge’s article. If the search engine didn’t already know about Eric’s site, it would now and it would make a note to send some robots over to Eric’s site to see what’s there. In fact, many search engines use the number of outside links to help determine how useful a site actually is. So every time someone like me links to Eric’s article, many search engines will regard that page is being “useful” in some way.
So regardless, the search engines will find Eric’s site. And they will find *your* site too. One of the most amazing ways is through web-based email. Do you have a hotmail, yahoo, or gmail address? By simply email a friend your web link, you’ve probably clued one of those search engines in to that fact that your site exists on the web.
So what on earth is that SEO firm doing when they offer to submit your site to search engines? Well, it’s simple, the go to a page like this: http://www.google.com/addurl/ and they type in your website and click the “add” button. Is that SEO firm trying to charge you hundreds of dollars to click “add” on each search engine’s homepage? Yes. Is it necessary? Probably not. Most likely you’ll be able to go to any search engine and run a search on yourself and find that you’re already in their database, so submitting the url directly to the search engine is probably a waste of time.
3. Eric raises a red flag for SEO firms that use 302 redirects.
What is a “302 redirect”? Many servers give their users the ability to forward traffic from one page to another. One of the most effective ways to do this is with a “redirect”.
For Example: imagine your website has a recipe page in a file called “myrecipes.html”. One day you may have so many recipes that one page alone isn’t enough anymore, so you hire a web designer to make you a recipe database and now all your recipes are found by going to the file “recipes/index.php”. Well, all the search engines will remember the old “myrecipies.html” page, and they will continue to send people there. However, since that page no-longer exists, people will start getting a standard “error 404″ page. The search engine may not be happy with you and these error pages may hurt your ranking/reputation with them.
To avoid this, the web designer would create a redirect so anyone who tries to visit the old page will automatically get forwarded to the new page. When they do this, they have two major choices, use a Permanent 301 redirect or a Temporary 302 redirect. It should be obvious that a permanent 301 is much better than a temporary 302. What’s worse is something called “302 Hijacking”, where people have abused the temporary 302 redirects to try to trick search engines into giving them credit for pages on other sites. Once again, search engines must react to the miss-use of a simple web tool and guard against cheaters.
4. Eric warns about SEO firms that focus on link swapping.
As I mentioned in point number two, by linking to Eric Enge’s article, I’m letting search engines know about him (even though all the search engines probably *already* know all about him). The more people who link to Eric’s article, the more the search engines tend to regard that page on his site as useful. Search engines also use the words in the link itself as keywords. My link to Eric’s site at the top of this article reads: “11 Ways to Recognize a Bad SEO Firm.” When seeing that link, search engines will associate words like “Recognize Bad SEO Firm” with Eric’s article. At the same time, someone else may have linked to Eric’s article as “SEO Tips To Watch Out For”. Both phrases describe what you will find when you click the link, and both are used by the search engines to figure out what that page is about.
Some SEO Firms think “more links from other sites” equals “better search rankings”. So they find ways to get you to swap links with as many other websites as possible under the pretense that both sites are helping each other out. Though their is some truth to that, it will only get you so far, especially if you’re swapping links for the sake swapping links.
These days, there are “directory” pages popping up all over the web that only exist to link swap. You can find directories of “some buzz word” that are full of links to sites that involve “some buzz word”. But how useful are these sites to the viewers? If anyone under the sun can get their link into the directory, then how can you tell which sites are useful and which are useless?
In the end, link swapping is no substitute for useful and unique content that people can’t help but link to. I linked to Eric’s article, not because I know the guy, not because he asked me to, not because he might link back to me, but because I found his article useful. Imagine how many people out there also found his article useful and linked to it in their blogs.
Also, link swapping is no substitute for a real marketing campaign/strategy. How many times have you passed old buildings or telephone poles covered with ads for music and movies. How many times have you spent more than a split second on those fliers as you pass? Now consider how many music albums you’ve bought and how many movies you went to see after reading a review from a credible review source like a website or a magazine that you trust. A hundred useless links verses one useful link, which will make the sale?
5. Eric warns against SEO Firms that use the “same link building methods on all clients.”
This point doesn’t have any major technical vocabulary to cut through or explain. He’s simply saying every site and every company is different and should have a unique strategy for building your site’s reputation and gaining traffic/customers. So don’t go with a SEO Firm that blindly applies the same strategy to every customer.
6. Eric warns about SEO Firms that recommend micro sites to try to increase your rankings/traffic.
Again, Eric’s description is very self explanatory. More sites means more upkeep. It’s better to focus all efforts and unique content on the main site.
7. Eric warns about running your content across multiple domains.
Once again, Eric’s made a clear and straight forward point that I don’t feel needs any technical breakdown or explanation.
8. Eric warns against SEO Firms that talk about using hidden text or tricks.
As you may have already noticed. Each time people abuse a tool (like meta keywords or redirects), the search engines are forced to wise up to the tricks and react to them. Anything that seems like a “trick” is a bad idea. Even if it does get you lots of traffic for the next two months, there’s no telling what kind of backlash you may get when the search engines decide to take action against it.
9. (I love this one) Eric notes that any SEO Firm that claims to know the Google algorithm is not to be trusted.
There are so many variables involved in Google’s algorithm that it’s likely that no one person knows exactly how it works. Plus it’s an ever changing formula as they are constantly trying to improve it and are constantly reacting to people trying to use exploits and tricks. Anyone who claims to know the Google algorithm is flat-out lying to you.
10. Eric warns about SEO Firms that promise #1 rankings.
Eric’s wrapped this one up nicely. Please re-read his original text for item 10. As you may have noticed, in all my explanations I’ve been careful not to suggest I know the black and white answers. There are too many search engines all with different priorities and algorithms for anyone to claim to know definitively how to get you to rank number 1.
11. Finally, Eric’s last tip is to watch out for SEO Firms that don’t want to tell you what they are doing.
What better way to show a customer you know something than to take the time to explain it to them? Anyone hiding this information is hiding something from you.
Special Thanks to Eric Enge’s great article!
Tags: SEO