Thursday, March 02, 2006
Questionable Search Engine Tactic Two: Redirection
Tactic: Redirection; Level: Moderately evil – You may have seen this one in the news if you follow geeky tech news like I do. BMW Europe’s entire web site was banned from Google’s search engine for engaging in this tactic. What is redirection? It’s actually a combination of a non-evil tactic and evil one. Let me explain.
First, it’s a common and more or less accepted tactic to put lots and lots of very specific text, repeatedly but not in a repetitive pattern, on your web pages in order to increase the perceived quality of your page. This makes for some very odd looking pages, and it’s why you’ll often see pages that sell something very simple appear to say way more than they need to about the product. The more times those keywords are mentioned in a page in the context of normal writing – that is, not just mindlessly repeated all over the page, but actually used in intelligible ways – the more likely that page will be found for those keywords.
This is what’s called keyword “quality” – it means that you are actually talking about the keywords on your page, rather than just listing them to elevate your search rankings. Listing tons of words is another old school tactic and search engines get around this by looking for quality. The problem with creating this kind of quality for a commercial site is that it can create (as I mentioned before) some odd looking pages, especially if you are trying to sell a high-dollar, exclusive product like a luxury car.
The redirection trick works like this: A web site operator (in this case, BMW Europe) sets up one of these pages loaded with quality keywords (BMW, car, luxury, etc., all in quality sentences or context) to pull a higher ranking in the search listing. The unwitting Google user clicks on that link and is magically taken to BMW Europe’s homepage, which happens to have very little wording on it – just lots of pictures and other stuff you’d expect on a normal auto manufacturer site. The trick here is that the user is actually taken to the keyword-loaded page and then redirected to BMW’s homepage without ever noticing that they actually went through this hidden “gateway.” Since this is against Google’s terms of service, BMW Europe got banned from Google’s listings until they changed their pages.
First, it’s a common and more or less accepted tactic to put lots and lots of very specific text, repeatedly but not in a repetitive pattern, on your web pages in order to increase the perceived quality of your page. This makes for some very odd looking pages, and it’s why you’ll often see pages that sell something very simple appear to say way more than they need to about the product. The more times those keywords are mentioned in a page in the context of normal writing – that is, not just mindlessly repeated all over the page, but actually used in intelligible ways – the more likely that page will be found for those keywords.
This is what’s called keyword “quality” – it means that you are actually talking about the keywords on your page, rather than just listing them to elevate your search rankings. Listing tons of words is another old school tactic and search engines get around this by looking for quality. The problem with creating this kind of quality for a commercial site is that it can create (as I mentioned before) some odd looking pages, especially if you are trying to sell a high-dollar, exclusive product like a luxury car.
The redirection trick works like this: A web site operator (in this case, BMW Europe) sets up one of these pages loaded with quality keywords (BMW, car, luxury, etc., all in quality sentences or context) to pull a higher ranking in the search listing. The unwitting Google user clicks on that link and is magically taken to BMW Europe’s homepage, which happens to have very little wording on it – just lots of pictures and other stuff you’d expect on a normal auto manufacturer site. The trick here is that the user is actually taken to the keyword-loaded page and then redirected to BMW’s homepage without ever noticing that they actually went through this hidden “gateway.” Since this is against Google’s terms of service, BMW Europe got banned from Google’s listings until they changed their pages.
Questionable Search Engine Tactic One: Comment Spamming
Today, the first in a rogue's gallery of questionable search engine tactics:
Tactic: Comment Spamming; Level: Very Evil – Search engines base a substantial portion of a site’s ranking on how many actual links on the web point to the site, and you’ll notice quickly that tactics to increase the number of these links dominate this list. Some of these tactics are borderline legitimate while others are truly evil; this one may be the most evil of all.
If you spend much time on the web, you’ve probably come across weblogs (like this one), or so-called “blogs,” where people post their thoughts, opinions or various specialized news items. Blogs are absurdly popular right now – even the chairman of General Motors has one – and anyone can set one up in a matter of minutes.
Unfortunately, the popularity of blogs has made them easy marks for all sorts of abuse. Because most blogs by default allow anyone to comment on the articles that are posted there, spammers and quite a few disreputable search engine optimization outfits watch for new blogs and then immediately fill the comments sections with advertisements – some blatant, some subtle – that link to their sites.
Why not just create pages and pages of links on their own sites and click them to generate more search hits? Well, they may do that as well, but spamming through a variety of different websites actually creates the impression to the search engine that the links may be of higher quality because they come from so many different places. All search engines are built to ignore many links from the same places – that’s old school. But in analyzing a huge variety of clicks from many different places, a search engine has to work much harder to determine what’s legitimate.
Why is this tactic so evil? First, it creates a ton of bogus links on the web, and thus just adds noise to whole system. It’s deceptive to the point of being fraudulent. Worst of all, it treads on someone’s personal space – like mom’s needlepoint weblog – to help someone else’s commercial enterprise. If you come across a search engine optimization company that promises a huge variety of quality links to elevate your listings, ask them how they are doing it, in detail – it’s possible that comment spamming will be illegal one of these days, so you don’t want to have your business’ name associated with it.
Tactic: Comment Spamming; Level: Very Evil – Search engines base a substantial portion of a site’s ranking on how many actual links on the web point to the site, and you’ll notice quickly that tactics to increase the number of these links dominate this list. Some of these tactics are borderline legitimate while others are truly evil; this one may be the most evil of all.
If you spend much time on the web, you’ve probably come across weblogs (like this one), or so-called “blogs,” where people post their thoughts, opinions or various specialized news items. Blogs are absurdly popular right now – even the chairman of General Motors has one – and anyone can set one up in a matter of minutes.
Unfortunately, the popularity of blogs has made them easy marks for all sorts of abuse. Because most blogs by default allow anyone to comment on the articles that are posted there, spammers and quite a few disreputable search engine optimization outfits watch for new blogs and then immediately fill the comments sections with advertisements – some blatant, some subtle – that link to their sites.
Why not just create pages and pages of links on their own sites and click them to generate more search hits? Well, they may do that as well, but spamming through a variety of different websites actually creates the impression to the search engine that the links may be of higher quality because they come from so many different places. All search engines are built to ignore many links from the same places – that’s old school. But in analyzing a huge variety of clicks from many different places, a search engine has to work much harder to determine what’s legitimate.
Why is this tactic so evil? First, it creates a ton of bogus links on the web, and thus just adds noise to whole system. It’s deceptive to the point of being fraudulent. Worst of all, it treads on someone’s personal space – like mom’s needlepoint weblog – to help someone else’s commercial enterprise. If you come across a search engine optimization company that promises a huge variety of quality links to elevate your listings, ask them how they are doing it, in detail – it’s possible that comment spamming will be illegal one of these days, so you don’t want to have your business’ name associated with it.
