Posts tagged black hat
20 Teeny Weeny Site Features That Make You Look Like a Spammer!
Mar 15th
After you’ve been hanging out on the street corners of the internet for some time, you get to recognise the characters – the websites – you can trust and those you can’t. In many cases it involves purely judging books by their covers – none of these features taken in isolation would indicate a spam site, by any stretch of the imagination. But when you see a guy with dark glasses, dirty clothes, greasy hands, and a big hat on to hide his face … you don’t go giving him your credit card details, do you?! Have a look over these features that can make you look like a spammer – and think about whether they might be negating your good internet marketing work.
There's all sorts of Spam sites - don't let your site resemble one!
- Domain names like .info, .cc, etc.
- High ratio of ads to content … most quality sites prefer to sell their service or their info, not everybody else’s
- Spam keywords! Pharmaceuticals, gambling or adult related terms
- Few direct visits, as opposed to search engine visits
- Not registered with Google Webmaster Tools or similar services
- Does not have an SSL security certificate … especially on the credit card payment pages.
- Not listed in the Yahoo Directory – that link costs a couple of hundred dollars but is standard for most sites that are serious about being found on the net.
- Contains multiple hyphens in the domain name
- Do not contain a privacy policy or copyright pages
- No physical address or phone number listed on the site. If you are taking payments from your customers this is a must – many people will check to see that you’re a ‘real’ company before they even consider handing over their sixteen digits and expiry date.
- Not registered on Google Local
- No social media initiatives, like Facebook Pages, Myspace profiles or Youtube channels
- No links from domains with .mil, edu or .gov extensions. Obviously these are hard to get – but it is just another piece in the distrust puzzle.
- Domain is registered by a party that owns a large number of domains – people that have a ‘harem’ of domains.
- Contains malware, viruses, spyware and automated downloads. Of course sometimes legitimate sites get hacked and have viruses inserted too … but you don’t want to be around those either!
- Misspellings! Everyone slips up now and then – but if you don’t have your site professionally proofed and edited, you definitely run the risk of losing trust from your visitors
- Don’t usually pay for PPC traffic, or end up close to the bottom of the sponsored results.
- The content on the site does not require a high reading level, as measured by the Fleisch-Kincaid scale that ‘grades’ text according to who could understand it
- Contain a large number of snippets of duplicate content
- Not likely to offer content in the forms of PDFs, PPTs, Word DOCs, etc.
If your site matches many of these characteristics, and especially if you haven’t upgraded your design in quite a few years, you’re likely to be seen as a spammer by visitors, although you might have the best of intentions. Get a web marketing expert to help you clean up the site … and stop letting visitors go to waste!
Five MORE Reasons Your Site Might Have Been Google-Banned
Mar 12th
Despite all of your web marketing genius – you’ve carefully paced your link building activities, kept your keyword density to the minimum of the effective range and been checking for duplicate content every second day – Google still got the stick out and whacked your site. Why, oh why … oh WHY? Here are five more possible explanations.
1. Doorway pages
Google doesn’t like doorway pages. These pages are usually optimised to rank well for a particular keyword, but are ‘hidden’ from the navigation of the main site. Someone would usually enter a doorway page through a search engine result, but if they bookmarked your home page, wouldn’t be able to find it again. You see this often when companies service a sizeable physical area and want to optimise for several locations – “removalists Melbourne”, “removalists Coburg”, “removalists Northcote”, “removalists Brunswick”, for example. If you want to use doorway pages, make sure they’re accessible from the main navigation.
2. Redirect pages
You can redirect pages to other ones legitimately in Google, for example if you choose to change your domain name. However, the pages that come in groups of between 5 and 500, all targeting similar keyword phrases, and contain no content except links to other pages in the family, AND THEN redirect you to a different page when you click from search results, are a Google no-no.
3. Buying links
Google is keeping an index (funny, that) of all the sites that sell links to other sites, and is devaluing the links from those sites. You will end up paying for nothing – and probably getting slapped with a Google-fine, as well.
4. Linking to spam/bad neighborhoods
We’ve talked in a previous post about linking to spam and bad neighborhoods – Google doesn’t like it, and if you don’t keep on top of your checks you may find that previously reputable domains have expired and been bought out by spammers.
5. Code swapping
If you optimise a page for good rankings, and swap the content there once it is ranking well, Google will often penalise you when they crawl that page again.
5 Acceptable SEO Techniques to Learn From the Black-Hatters
Feb 22nd
One thing that few self-service style SEO guides make clear is the distinction between white-hat and black-hat tactics. SEO is a tool that can be used in a variety of different ways … so while a fork can be used to pick up food, it can also be used to stab somebody. Google is trying to avoid being stabbed with the forks they hand out, in the form of the reward that their algorithm provides to different sites! However, every current black-hat technique started out as a legitimate way for Google to differentiate between sites for relevance. So how can you get back to basics, and safely use those ‘black-hat’ style techniques?
Black and White Hat SEO are opposite sides of the same thing...
1. Hide your text
Black hatters use hidden text for nonsensical keyword stuffing. Legitimate sites can still get the benefit of any keywords that may be located in hidden text, but without cluttering the page itself, using JQuery effects like mouseovers to make text appear, etc. Here is a legitimate example (text in the question marks).
2. Mis-spelled terms
It is a popular black hat technique to try and rank for misspelt versions of popular terms, for example, ‘credtit report’. If you have a common misspelling in your industry, define it somewhere on your page, and let visitors know the correct version.
3. Grow your own farmed links
Create a network of related blogs in house, each focusing on a niche within your company or industry. A single person should be able to manage four or five, still very professionally.
4. Pay for your links
But not in the standard black hat way – donate to charitable organizations or community organizations that have a ‘Sponsors’ page with followed links.
5. Do some brand jacking
Do you have a legitimate tale of disappointment from a corporation? People love to complain, and they love bad news, and they love to hear about how terrible a place is before they do business with them. It is a legitimate purpose – just don’t overdo it, your site will develop a negative ‘aura’!