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Cleaning Up the Messes – Reviving a Site
Banned for Spamming
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
February 7 2006
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The firm I work for, StepForth Placement is making a service out of cleaning
up other people’s search marketing messes. That alone is not big
news. As a part of our general services SEO firms have been cleaning up
other people’s messes for years. What is big news is that Google
finally appears to be taking action against some of the most egregious
forms of “black-hat” SEO techniques. Cleaning up messy SEO
might be more important than ever.
We think the timing for such a service is especially good. Google’s
Big Daddy upgrade appears to be capable of cutting spam from its spider’s
diet. Eating right is the path to good health, at least according to almost
every nutritionist I’ve met, each of who would agree with the adage,
you are what you eat. That old saying is absolutely true for search engine
indexes, which are entirely made up of material consumed and copied by their
spiders. The upgrading of Google’s data network appears to include
a structured dietary plan and Google is obviously not shy about insulting
a few iron chefs.
For the past few days, the search marketing world has been abuzz with the
news BMW’s German language site was banned by Google for using a form
of cloaking. Basically, the site BMW presented to live-viewers was fundamentally
different than the one presented to search engine spiders, a direct violation
of user guidelines posted by the search engines. Live visitors saw a graphic
based site while search spiders were fed a text based one.
Several discussions have erupted over the move, some of which have challenged
the right of Google to de-list a website as important as BMW.de. If Google
is going to follow through in the direction it appears to be going, there
will be a number of similar discussions to come. Matt Cutts, Google’s
chief of organic search, has been saying Google is going after SEO spammers
for the past few months.
If Google is serious about going after deceptive tactics, they have a lot
of fertile ground to quickly cover. Though search has been an advertising
medium for over a decade, the past three have been breakthrough years in
search marketing. Over the past three years, most businesses have come to
understand that search engine marketing is as, or more important, than traditional
Yellow Pages advertising, and the least expensive way to get a message to
potential customers.
That interest spurred the enormous growth of the SEO industry. There are
now far more SEOs than there were in 2002, some of which have learned to
practice the aggressive form of SEO known as “black-hat”. While
considered dangerous and irresponsible by ethics-driven SEO firms, the aggressive
optimization techniques tended to get strong results under the most competitive
of keywords and phrases. Sometimes, they also draw penalties such as the
case with BMW. It is little wonder that those proficient in their practice
of dark-art SEO tended to draw mega-dollar contracts.
There are a number of dark-art SEO shops, some of which have grown to be
quite large; exploiting cracks in the search algorithms and their customers’ technical
knowledge. Some of their customers are among the largest corporations in
the world. Along with a number of smaller businesses that can’t afford
to make such mistakes, they are being led down a dangerous and deceptive
path.
While generally considered unwise by most long-term search marketers, it
is not terribly difficult to deceive a search spider. A glance at search
results at Google, Yahoo and MSN shows how easy it can be with some of the
largest players in the travel, automotive, publishing and real estate industries
using techniques such as cloaking, IP detection, and java script redirects
to rank higher than their smaller competitors.
It’s not the techniques themselves that are the problem; it is the
application of them in order to fool or deceive search spiders. There might
be a technically sound reason for designing a site that redirects classes
of users based on their IP numbers. There might be a sound (and in some
cases officially sanctioned) reason for using cloaking or IP detection to
feed different sets of information to different types of site visitor. In
the case of search engine optimization however, these techniques must be
avoided and apparently will be detected and penalized by Google’s
webspam team.
Today’s Search
Engine Journal carries a story on the BMW ban in which
editor Loren Baker asks, “… was this a stupid decision by BMW
to run this junk or a stupid decision by their web marketing manager to
contract an SEO company that does not have half a clue as to what they are
doing?”
For the long-term SEO firms who have spent enough time in the trenches
to fully understand how the search engines judge and rank sites, cleaning
up the messes made by new or black-hat SEOs has been part of our lives for
a long time. Now, there is simply so much messy SEO out there to work on,
we are introducing an enhanced service option to address it.
While we are still trying to come up with a label for this service, we
have narrowed our options to a few. Here are two names we’re working
with, Taint-out and Docu-Doc. I am leaning toward the latter personally
but regardless of which name we choose, the field is obviously wide open
for entry.
Any suggestions for a name?
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