With all this talk about Marketing PR and SEO, it’s important to note how legitimate and “squeaky clean” you need to be keeping your Internet marketing and search engine optimization activities. If you practice “bad” SEO, then spamming and other underhanded SEO tactics will get you in trouble sooner than later, even banned from Internet search engines.
MarketingProfs.com published a very informative article last week entitled Beware of Black Hat SEO by Stephan Spencer. In the article Spencer recounts that “not even the largest corporations spending big dollars on Google AdWords are immune. For example, BMW recently had its entire BMW.de site banned from Google for a period of time because it created "doorway pages"—pages full of keyword-rich copy created solely for the search engine spiders and never for human viewing. To add insult to injury, BMW was publicly outed by Google engineer Matt Cutts on his blog. He made an example of BMW, and all of the SEO community became aware of the carmaker's indiscretions.”
At HRmarketer we pride ourselves in our thorough knowledge and expert application of legitimate, state-of-the-art organic SEO. Contact us today if you’d like to hear more about our Internet Marketing and Media services.
And if you can't say with absolutely certainty that you're squeaky clean in your tactics, then you'd better study the following list of “black hat tactics” to avoid recommended by Spencer:
"Sneaky redirects"—redirecting visitors immediately as they enter your site from a search engine
Hidden or tiny text—making the text the same color as the background; or shrinking the font size way down; or employing noscript, noframes, iframes, or hidden
tags to hide text and/or links
Keyword stuffing—the excessive placement of keywords within web pages (e.g., in alt tags, meta tags, etc.)
Targeting irrelevant keywords—optimizing for popular keywords that have no relevance to your business
Selling PageRank—selling text links to advertisers/partners in order to pass on PageRank to their sites
Trademark infringement—mentioning competitor names in your meta tags and elsewhere
Duplicating content—making numerous copies of web pages or excerpts of web pages
Spamglish—nonsensical, keyword-rich gibberish
Doorway pages—those that aren't useful or interesting to human visitors
Machine-generating pages—using software to create so-called content for search engines
Pagejacking—hijacking or stealing content from high-ranking websites and placing that content on your site with few or no changes
Cloaking—detecting search engine spiders when they visit and modifying the page content specifically for the spiders in order to improve rankings
Participating in "link farms"—linking to, or receiving links from, "Free For All" sites or link networks, which typically contain many links per page and are poorly organized
Buying expired domains with high PageRank—snapping up domain names when they expire with the hopes of laying claim to the previous site's inbound links
Multiple domains without redirecting—in effect this is duplicating content
"Thin affiliate"—ushering people to a number of affiliate programs without providing any added value
Linking to "bad neighborhoods"—linking to link farms or otherwise unsavory sites
Blog comment spamming—posting bogus comments to blogs, with links to your site
Guestbook spamming—posting bogus comments to sites' guestbooks, with links to your site
Splogging—creating blogs and posting to them content stolen from other sites
Google-bowling—submitting your competitor to link farms etc. to get them penalized