September 2003

Don't be fooled by the search engine cowboys - unethical tactics revealed

Sam Steane

The chances are your business has a website and you know that in order to attract visitors to it, you need to promote it. But where do you start, and how do you know the best ways of promoting it?
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of scammers and cowboys out there, all out to take your money, making lots of false promises and using methods that could lead to your website being banned from the search engines. Here are some of the things to look out for and avoid.

Cowboy tactic number 1: Submit your website to 1000 search engines for £99!

You've seen the ads and you've been sent the emails (probably hundreds of times!) For starters, there aren't thousands of search engines. There are only a handful of search engines which power at least 85% of web searches, and most of these will charge you nothing at all to submit to. What's more, most will not accept automated submissions.

Anybody offering to submit your website to 1000 search engines is not going to sit there and submit your website to each individual search engine - it would take days! So they use software - a tactic which search engines do not accept and have taken measures to prevent being used for submissions.

It is unlikely you will ever be given a list of which search engines your website has been submitted to, and many would be very obscure - do you think it will help to have your website listed in a Mongolian search engine?

The only purpose the exercise will serve is to collect your email address, add it to hundreds of lists, inundate you with spam and charge you £99 for the privilege.

Cowboy tactic number 2: Buy multiple domains

Buying multiple domains is usually a good thing. It ensures competitors do not buy up variations of your domain name; it also allows you to buy other domains related to your products or services and possibly promote them independently. It all depends on how you use multiple domains.

Unfortunately, the search engine optimisation (SEO) cowboys out there see buying up multiple domains as an opportunity to 'spam' the search engines. Having the same content on several domains will give them a good chance of having multiple listings across the search engines.

This can work for a period of time, but the search engines will eventually find out. Search engines exist to give surfers relevant search results, and do not like to list hundreds of domains all relating to the same website. Not only does this clutter up the search engine's database, but it undermines their reputation for giving relevant search results.

If you believe that having multiple domains will boost your chance of gaining more search results, it could work for a period of time, but eventually your website will be banned.

Cowboy tactic number 3: Create lots of doorway/landing pages

If you don't want to buy up multiple domains and promote them to boost your search engine rankings, then you can create doorway or landing pages for this purpose. Depending on how you use them, this may or may not be acceptable.

A website built mostly using dynamic urls or flash will need some static html pages with good content to enable the search engines to index the website, as they still have difficulty with dynamic pages, flash and heavy graphics. Doorway pages are open to abuse, and again seen as another way of spamming the search engines.

The classic tactic is to create multiple doorway pages, targeting different key phrases and repeating the key phrase on the page as many times as possible. Just look at this example of a spammy doorway page. - they even list all their doorway pages at the bottom of the page!

As with multiple domains, pages such as these can rank well for a period of time, but the search engines are ready to ban the entire domain when they are found. Watch out for the cowboys whose idea of optimising a website is to create multiple doorway pages, some of which may be hosted on their own domain and not on yours.

Cowboy tactic number 4: Swap links with as many websites as you can find

The number of incoming links or 'link popularity' is another important aspect of a search engine's ranking algorithms. The idea of incoming links is that the website hosting your link is relevant to your products and services, is a good quality website or has a genuine page of links and descriptions to websites deemed to be good sources of information.

Unfortunately, link popularity is often abused by the cowboys in the belief that it is the number of incoming links that will boost a websites search results, irrespective of the quality of those links. Swapping or obtaining links from irrelevant or poor quality websites will not enhance your link popularity in any way, and could damage your reputation.

Google makes it very clear on their website what to look out for and avoid when choosing an SEO firm, and tactics of the cowboys.

These are just a few of some of the unethical techniques used by some SEO companies. Some are much more devious. Our advice - do not touch them. Quick results in the short term will affect your business reputation in the long term.