Neo•Paradigms
We are seo professionals. We adhere, voluntarilly, to a SEO Code of Ethics. We are not alone in our practices or ethics. However, we also know a great many so-called SEO practitioners have no reservation about bending and breaking the rules - even the laws - that govern Internet business and SEO practices. They are a small minority but they damage the group.
There are virtually limitlss ways to improperly promote sites on the Intenet. Almost all of them rely on misrepresentation and/or misdirection of the end user and the search engine spiders. Call the methods black hat tricks, black arts or the like - they all amount to seo fraud and if you practice them, you will pay dearly.
An example of misrepresentation is the introduction of hundreds, even thousands, of false content pages into a single site. The entry page of this site then would contain invisible links to these pages and instructions for the spiders to follow and index the entire site's contents. This sort of abuse is getting easier to weed out but new and 'improved' methods of this same behavior continually crops up. If an SEO agent approaches you and requires access to your site to load numerous paged content into your site, content you do not write or see and approve, do not do so.
This type of abuse assists in watering down the validity or SERPs (Search Engine Return Pages). When you stop and consider that the databases of Google and the like contains hundreds of millions of pages, fully indexed and catalogued for retrieval and that these listings are continually reprocessed and updated for accuracy then you may begin to understand the damage that seo fraud can cost.
The second type of seo trickery involves misdirection and, as it is with a magician, is tougher to spot. One of my personal favorites (to spot, not to use) is one of the reasons frameset designed web pages are having increasing difficulty getting their content read by search engines and are failing to acheive page rankings. The best method to explain it is to show you. Click the link below - don't worry, you'll be right back here before you know it...
Sneaky Link... If the page appears blank, hit Refresh on your browser
See, right back where you started from ...or ARE you?
Look at the Title of this page - at the top of your browser. That's not where you started from is it? View Source (from your browser View menu) and look for the following (or just believe that it is there):
<!-- Begin SEO Dirty Trick -->
<frameset rows="100%" border=0 frameborder=0 framespacing=o>
<frameset cols="100%,*" border=0 frameborder=0 framespacing=o>
<frame src="seo-tricks.html#return_from_misdirection"scrolling="auto" noresize> <frameset>
<!-- End SEO Dirty Trick -->
I have copied this exactly as I found it (excepting the URL, of course) from a page used by a not too terribly bright SEO. It does not stop this agent from making a lot of money, however. It is also misdirection and against the published rules of every major search engine authority. If done cleverly (which it was not and therefore I noticed it) it is exceedingly difficult to catch. The page I used, if you do view it, reads that 'this page contains no content...' The page that I lifted the above code segment from contained mathematically determined numbers of keywords in mostly silly paragraphs and image tags loaded with keywords that pointed to image filenames (keyworded) that did not exist.
Who built the page? I don't know. Does the page point to a web site with rich original content? Who knows. That, of course, is the problem with this sort of trick - and why it is strictly prohibited by search engine editors. There was a time when this sort of thing was pandemic. It worked... for a while. Today this sort of thing is actively searched for by both human and software editors and pages that employ them are rapidly weeded out and banned. When this page was originally written I was able to point to a few examples. Those pages are no longer available. They are conspicuous in their absence and provide, therefore, mute testimony to the inevitable consequence of trying to take the 'easy' way to higher page rankings.
One final word: Do not employ or pay to employ seo fraud or attempt to trick the search engines. It pollutes the entire process, costs thousands of dollars and, if you get caught (and you WILL be caught, eventually) you will suffer the consequences of seo trickery. Do Not Do It.
