SEO
FrightSites: Top Thirteen Worst Website / Search Issues seen in 2K5 (Part
1)
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
October 28 2005
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Everyone loves Top10 lists. In the SEO industry, where search engine
results form the ultimate Top10 lists for clients and practitioners, the
sheer number of ways a website, document or other spiderable object can
be designed makes it very difficult to produce a general Top10 list for
best practices. There are however, a number of basic mistakes made by
webmasters, site designers and new online-entrepreneurs that inadvertently
create obstacles to search placement success.
In other words, while it is difficult to say exactly what one should do
in any given circumstance, it is fairly simple to say what one shouldn’t
do. In the spirit of the Friday before Halloween, here is a list of the
Top10 worst things we’ve seen designers doing this year.
1) ISP Hosted Shopping Cart CMS Template Generated Websites
The worst and I mean absolute worst commercial websites to work on are
designed using sub-standard shopping cart CMS generated templates. Often
designed by micro-businesses new to the Internet, these sites tend to look
as if they were created several years ago. In some cases, the templates
they use were written in the last century.
These CMS systems rarely produce a quality product to represent your products.
The advantage seen by new Internet businesses are often found in the “business
in a box” solution these schemes offer by enabling website design
with a shopping cart and credit-card processing. In the end, the business
owner doesn’t even get what he or she paid for as monthly fees are
often more expensive over time than the development and hosting of a professional
website.
A quick caveat… There are some very well designed Shopping Cart CMS
systems out there that have worked hard to take SEO concerns into consideration.
These systems tend to be newer, having been developed and instituted in
the last two years. ApplePie from RoseRock Design is one example.
2) Continued use of duplicate-template CMS systems by competitors
in the same industry (especially prevalent in real estate industry)
Following on the points above, the use of duplicate content templates makes
achieving search placements very difficult. While some content such as name,
location and region-specific information might vary; the layout is almost
identical as are the all too common shared information-includes. Facilitating
the creation of multiple incidents of duplicate content, even if everyone
else in the local sector is doing it is not a particularly good search engine
placement technique.
3) Duplicate Content on Multiple Domains
Speaking of duplicate content, there is a second, more damaging type of “dupe-content” which
continues to be practiced out there. Some webmasters purchase multiple domain
names, often trying to protect the brand name on their original one but
sometimes in attempt to manipulate search rankings. The problem is, they
populate those domains with duplicate content. Like most of us, search engines
rarely enjoy reading the same stuff twice. They are very unlikely to give
good rankings to incidents of duplicate content. Nevertheless, dupe-content
persists, often due to neglect more than intent.
A few years ago, someone, (most likely working in the domain registrar
industry), said it would be a good idea to purchase the URL for every possible
incident of your corporate name. The logic is sound as it prevents confusion
if another company with a similar name opens somewhere in the world. Lots
of companies followed this logic and needing something to put up on those
domains, they simply replicated content found at their original domain.
In the past year, we have seen more than one incident where a global-scale
corporation replicated duplicate content across dozens of nation specific
TDLs (.ca, .ie, .co.uk, etc…) The correct way to use a number of TDLs
is to either produce content that is unique and relevant to visitors from
the region each TDL represents, or to use the 301
(permanent) or 302 (temporary) redirect command to reference search spiders and site visitors to the site
containing the original content.
In previous years, the words used to phrase a domain name had much more
influence over organic search engine placements than they do today. That
led to the purchase and proliferation of multi-word URLs networked together
to blitz the Google algos. Mega-network promotions populated with URLs such
as homes-in-walla-walla-washington.com and realestate-agents-walla-walla-washington.com
and walla-walla-real-estate-homes.com were spawned and littered the web
with duplicate content. Some of that duplicate content remains in use. In
one extreme case, we saw what had been a duplicate-content site sold to
a new and obviously cyber-naive real estate agent.
4) Leader Pages – Doorway Pages – Customized Ranking
Pages
Every search engine uses a slightly different algorithm. Google’s
is heavily influenced by incoming links but considers an array of on-site/page
elements. Yahoo is also influenced by incoming links but also considers
a wider array of on-site/page factors as well. MSN is very influenced
by on-site/page factors. The other search engines have their own unique
ranking tendencies. Therefore, a version of each important page in
a site should be designed to achieve high rankings on each search engine,
based on the unique ranking method used by each search engine. On the
surface, that thinking makes sense. With a dozen or so mini-sites,
a link density network could be crafted to please Google’s link-dependent
algorithm. The method became a primary tool of the early SEO industry
when there were eight different search engines to think about.
Search engines implemented filters to remove leader or doorway pages, a
task made easier after the dot-com crash of 2000 when Google rose to be
the only major algorithmic search engine. When Yahoo and MSN introduced
their own proprietary search engines in 2004, a number of less than ethical
SEO firms began using leader or doorway pages again, sometimes culminating
in disastrous results as seen last year when two of the largest SEO spam-shops
in the United States got entire client lists banned from Google’s
database.
5) Link-Network Schemes
The client-list bans mentioned under the previous heading happened for
a couple of reasons. The first was duplicate content spread across a number
of leader or doorway pages. The second was that these doorway pages had
been connected together to form a massive link-network designed to game
Google’s page-rank dependent algorithms.
Link-networks as ranking schemes have sprung up over the course of the
ten-year history of the SEO sector. The premise and sales pitch is relatively
simple. Practically everyone familiar with Google’s ranking formulas
understands the importance of incoming links. What most people don’t
fully understand is the sophistication that goes into the way Google and
the other search engines judge the value and relevancy of links. The major
search engines need to have very stringent link-evaluation tools as pieces
of their ranking algorithms. Every search engine using links to recommend
new sites for inclusion in their databases stresses the importance of topical
relevance between linking documents. In other words, information on documents
that are linked together should have a direct or even indirect relationship.
Both Google and Yahoo consider the content found on documents that link
to each other before assigning a value to each link. They also consider
the age, intent and context of each linking document. In order to prevent
bogus link-networks from being established, both claim to and attempt to
consider the entire link-tree surrounding a URL before placing a value on
links found within or directed to it.
6) Hidden text
Hidden text describes a technique as simple as the name implies. By placing
keyword loaded text in places search engine spiders will see it but live-visitors
won’t, ill-informed webmasters and SEOs are trying to achieve high
placements through higher keyword to non-keyword ratios or densities. Hidden
text often takes the form of poorly camouflaged place names and services
tagged to the bottom of documents.
Sometimes hidden text takes the form of white-text on a white-background.
Other times it can be found in comment tags included in the source-code.
A more sophisticated way to hide text is to place it behind a <div> layer.
However one tries to hide hidden text, search engines always see through
the trick and will tend to apply penalties against sites using it.
Part Two of: “SEO FrightSites :: Top Thirteen Worst Website / Search
Issues seen in 2K5” will be published on Monday
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