Google’s bullying campaign

The lure of getting top listings in the search engines, besides setting the stage for SEO spamming is giving rise to unethical SEO techniques. Though it can’t be overlooked that search engine rankings are extremely competitive and Website owners are under constant pressure to do all they can to gain visibility in search results, but that doesn’t mean that it should be done at the cost of irking or exploiting the search engines. The webmasters have done their part and now it’s time for Google to bully them and freeze their sites. BMW’s recent death penalty verdict by Google has already started a landslide of news and commentary on search engine spam and the black-hat tactics. It seems Google has become adamant to give the weightage to the sites which have incorporated legitimate techniques ensuring ranking improvements that was earlier given to the bad guys. Some of the black-hat tactics that can toss an artificially inflated site to the bottom of the ranking pile are:

• Hidden text or hidden links
• Cloaking or tricky redirects
• Link farming
• Programmed queries to Google
• Irrelevant keywords buried in HTML Pages.
• Use of unrelated keywords
• Multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with duplicate content
• Mirror sites hosted on different domains/website address
• "Doorway" pages created with an intention to trick the search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or duplicate content
• Results manipulated by deceptive practices

Now when Google and the other search engines have decided to act, the black hat methodology will definitely be axed. Google simply blacklists the penalized site and drops it PR to 0. Sometimes the entire site is banned from the search engines and once you are banned you may have to resubmit your site for re-inclusion in search engine directories which takes a couple of months before you see your site listed again in the search engines. Search Engines give credibility to content rich sites and that is the only key to earn high ranking. The much needed resources for good Search Engine optimizations are developers, content writers and SEO specialists. It’s better to follow the fundamentals to have a better user experience and enjoy better ranking.