Bad Search Engine Optimisation

Bad Search Engine Optimisation

Author: Timothy Evan

Unethical internet marketing practices are known as "black hat". Link spamming is one such technique to mislead search engines in order to make them think that a particular webpage is being linked to more often than it really is. Spam farms used to be used to be used containing hundreds of websites to point to a single page. Google´s spam filters are now able to effectively exclude most spam farms from affecting their rankings. There is a spam report tool page in google and most other search engines in which you can easily report websites that use spam so that they may be delisted from the search engines.

A more advanced method still used by unethical marketing companies is to buy a domain used by a popular site that has recently expired but which used to have a high pagerank with lots of inbound links. In that way the new website can profit from the inbound links that may still exist to that site. Again google is capable to detecting when a website has changed its content significantly and should be able to filter out these instances.

Recently, google has announced that buying links has also been banned and google provides a useful report tool that can be used to report sites that are seen to be buying links. This has however met with resistence from companies whose entire earnings depend on such links. Search engines also have a list of spammy and trustworthy webpages that are human generated so nomatter how sophisticated an SEO technique is used, if it is not compliant with google´s guidelines, then it is likely to get caught and penalised eventually. It is therefore vital that a website adheres to google´s webmaster guidelines and avoid marking companies that may use black hat techniques on your site.