The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #7 “Avoid Black Hat Techniques”

They appear every so often on internet marketing forums; people claiming to have discovered a loophole or fool proof “black hat” search engine optimization technique. Their technique, available for a price, will propel your website to the top of the search engine listings – and of course they guarantee you’ll never get caught.

Now, think about it. While we’d all like to believe that there are methods that can get us to number one in Google with no effort whatsoever, it just isn’t true. Google is huge, and it’s smart. There’s no denying that those employing “black hat” (a phrase used to describe methods that go against Google, or other search engine’s terms of service) techniques may experience success at first, but it won’t be long term. Not ever. In fact, there’ll be lucky if it works for a few days.

Let’s say these people, these forum peddlers, really had discovered a flawless technique to guarantee themselves top of the pile picks in search engine results. Do you think they’d be selling their method for a couple of bucks on forums? No, of course not. If their method really worked, they’d be creating small affiliate websites in every profitable niche, working their SEO black hat magic and sitting back to watch the profits roll in. Furthermore, the more they publicize their method, the more likely it is that Google will discover it – so why would they risk it?

They wouldn’t, because these methods don’t exist. Avoid them. Don’t waste money, both on purchasing the method and the subsequent building and use of method on a website, on something that is doomed to fail.

The Seven Deadly Sins of SEO: #2 “Cloaking”

All the major search engines compete to make their search results as relevant, up to date and informative as possible. For a search engine to be considered effective, and therefore gain users, it relies on its reputation for providing the right information for any given search term.

They’re correct in assuming this. Imagine you were looking for some tips on how to clean your windows, and you used a search engine you’re unfamiliar with. If you visited a site through this new search engine, and it brought you to a website on adult porn – you wouldn’t be too happy, would you? In fact, you’d probably dismiss the search engine as useless, and wouldn’t bother to use it again.

That’s why search engines take issue with a practice known as ‘cloaking’ so very seriously. If their livelihood depends on the search results being accurate and informative, search engines have a duty to their own business ethics – as well as their customer’s – to frown upon cloaking, and they do. Do it, and your website will be removed from search results and most likely blacklisted.

So what is cloaking? Cloaking is the practice of writing a piece of programming that means human visitors to your website see something very different from what a search engine bot crawling your website sees. If you cloak effectively, you could indeed disguise your adult site as something as harmless as cleaning windows – and you’d benefit from a good SEO ranking. You’d also, unfortunately, ruin the search engine results – and they won’t accept that. S when it comes to cloaking, avoid this practice.

What Is Robots.txt?

For a search engine to keep their listings up to date, and present the most accurate search engine results, they perform an action known as a ‘crawl’. This is essentially sending a ‘bot’ (sometimes known as a ‘spider’) out to crawl the internet. The bot will then find new pages, updated pages or pages it did not previously know to exist. The end result of the crawl is that the search engine results page is updated, and all of the pages found on the last crawl are now included. It’s simply a method of finding sites on the internet.

However, there may be some instances where you have a website page you do not want included in search engine results. For example, you may be in the process of building a page, and do not want it listed in search engine results until it is completed. In these instances, you need to use a file known as robots.txt to tell a search engine bot to ignore your chosen pages within your website.

Robots.txt is basically a way of telling a search engine “don’t come in here, please”. When a bot finds a robots.txt file, it will ‘read’ it and will usually ignore all the URLs contained within. Therefore pages within the file do not appear in search results. It isn’t a failsafe; robots.txt is a request for bots to ignore the page, rather than a complete block, but most bots will obey the information found within the file. Some “nasty” bots may actually ignore your robots.txt file and index everything they find. However, for the nice bots, when you are ready for the page to be included in a search engine, you simply modify your robots.txt file and remove the URL of the designated page.