In Parts 1 through 7, you’ll learn how to develop your pitch, identify your keywords, and optimize and promote (for free) your site and pages to search engines around the world. You were also introduced to our legendary Doug (selling antique doors, door handles, knockers, doorbells or handles and fitting services) in Windsor, UK.

There are some search engine optimization and promotion techniques that I did not cover as they are unethical. In this part of the guide, I describe these techniques, so you can recognize and avoid them!

(a) Search Engine Ethics

Borrowing from the wild west, white hat SEO generally refers to ethical techniques, while black hat SEO is unethical techniques. Search engines are designed to help people find really relevant results for the keywords they enter, in a ranked order. Relevance is a mix of the “authority” of the site in general and the specific relevance of the content on the page to the search being performed. Anything that undermines this (ie creating false impressions of authority or relevance) is unethical because it undermines the key purpose of search engines.

Black hat practitioners tend to see search engine optimization as a war, and search engines and SEO as the enemy, to be defeated by hook or by crook. White Hatters tend to see search engines as friends, who can help them do business.

(b) Hidden page text

Blackhatters creates hidden text in the page code (not intended for humans). On a simple level, this could be white text on a white background. The text is usually hidden because it doesn’t fit in with the rest of the content on the page, but it helps with search engine results. This, by definition, means that as a human searcher, you are likely to be disappointed by the result when you land on this page.

In its Guide for Webmasters, Google urges you to “make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t mislead your users or present different content to search engines than you show to users.” “avoid hidden text or hidden links.” If you want to avoid being blacklisted by Google, I recommend that you pay attention to this advice.

(c) Buying incoming links

In its Guide for Webmasters, Google asks you to “avoid tricks designed to improve search engine rankings.” A good rule of thumb is if you would feel comfortable explaining what you have done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask: ‘Does this help my users? Would you do this if search engines didn’t exist?'”

You can find PR8 sitelinks on the web for sale for $200. From our exploration of PageRank above, you’ll understand why such a high price can be tolerated. As you can imagine, Google and others frown on this activity, as it undermines the entire principle of democracy that PageRank underpins. Buy votes? Unethical!

The consensus on the forums is that Google looks for unnatural link patterns, including substantial cross-linking, strong backlink growth, and the same anchor text on most links. I advise you to avoid this type of activity altogether!

(d) Use of link farms and IBLN

In its Guide for Webmasters, Google says “do not participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be negatively affected by those links.”

In practice, Google identifies “bad neighborhoods” by devaluing backlinks from the same IP subnet. When a site is simply a link farm site (listing a bunch of links to other sites, in exchange for links or money), Google will eventually identify it as a “bad neighborhood” and remove the links from its index.

Independent Backlink Networks (IBLN) are a network of sites that directly or indirectly link to your site in such a way as to promote it through search engine rankings. The way IBLNs get around Google’s IP monitoring is by using a completely different web hosting plan for each site they want to link directly to you.

This is time consuming and will cost you a lot of money. It’s also not foolproof and (if caught) can cause Google to simply remove all direct references from its index (sites they find blatantly created simply to link to your main site) or, worse yet, discard your entire IBLN: including the site main one you were trying to optimize for. Don’t be silly, keep it clean!

(e) Use of hidden pages or sneaky redirects

In its Guide for Webmasters, Google recommends “avoiding ‘gateway’ pages created just for search engines or other ‘cookie cutter’ approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.”

As Doug reads this, he begins to understand why doorknockers.com fails to rank higher in search engines. That domain simply redirects to a different site (with a regular business name) that also doesn’t rank well on Google. This poor businessman has clearly become an unwitting and almost innocent victim of Google’s policy to catch the Blackhatters.

You also understand why having your content on antique-door-knockers.com will be preferable to redirecting people to a domain based on your company name (Doug Chalmers Limited).

Next, we turn to the tools you can use to monitor the effectiveness of your ongoing optimization…

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SEO Expert Guide – Paid Site Promotion (Marketing) (part 7/10)

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SEO Expert Guide: Continuous Results Tracking (Part 9/10)