SolveYourProblem
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Series
SEO Strategies: Don't Try To Fool Google
Almost daily, I see a report about a company
or individuals who is trying to fool Google through SEO.
When are they going to learn that you just can’t
fool Google? Why would you even want to try it, with when you risk being
banned from the biggest search engine in the world? Many
people seem to try just because they wonder if it could ever
be done. As a general rule of thumb: it can't!
There are some instances in which people
think that they have tricked google. They believe that
something that they
have done has rocketed their site to the top of Google's
listings and they truly believe that they have managed to "stick
it to the man." Nine times out of ten when this happens
they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows
or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google's criteria
better than other sites in their category without even realizing
it.
Once
in a while someone will actually come up with a way to
fool Goggle. They will be enjoy a nice high spot on google's
listings for maybe even several months, but then the end
comes for these proud sites. As soon as Goggle notices that
it has been cheated, these sites are removed from the index;
sometimes permanently.
The fact is that these people don’t understand the power
that Goggle has. Anyone with a real interest in making
money from the web should consider that getting banned from
the
search engines effectively removes your site from the web. They don’t have to let you back in, and they don’t have to
give you any right to respond – you’re entirely at their
mercy. You don’t want to get in their bad books.
Aside from the fact that Goggle will remove you from its
listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool
Goggle. If you fool Goggle, you are fooling your
clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page
expecting to get something and really giving them something
else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often
than not it will chase the customer away for good.
If
you want your website to be found in categories that
don’t apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed
towards the top of the Goggle listings in these categories.
You can actually increase your sites reputation in Google’s
eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your
site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows
you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out
a few dollars a month.
Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google's
PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link
farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific
sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups
of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other
– like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both
cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the
ranks of Google's search results through the sheer quantity
of links to them –this is known as Googlebombing. But it
doesn’t always work.
Goggle
knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine for the
rest of us. After all, if link farms inflate the
rankings of less-useful Websites, then we’ll all start seeing
worse search results. That’s why Google constantly updates
PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page
Rank formula that Goggle implements is mysterious and ever
changing. This is the primary reason that Goggle cannot be fooled.
It
has been found recently that Google is now sending out
‘cloak bots’, disobeying robots.txt to find out whether
sites
are ‘cloaking’ – serving a different page to search engines
than what visitors see. These ‘cloak bots’ are controversial
but seem to have some positive effects on the Google’s results.
Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying
to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why
it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped
trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be
much easier to keep up with what’s going on.
As you may already know, Goggle publishes a list of guidelines
suggesting legitimate ways to improve a site's ranking, by
making it more accessible and better. One of the tips is
to make pages for users and not for search engines. You’d
do well to listen to their advice.
