Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Truly Brazen Attacks Sometimes you have to be thankful that something didn’t happen that could have happened. Subzero27, another regular poster to SEO Chat’s forums, noted that one day he started getting phone calls and email from the UK complaining that his India-based site was passing on viruses and spyware. He began checking his site from the source code out and couldn’t find anything wrong. He explained that “after deep analysis it was found out that someone had poisoned the dns and whichever sites were hosted on that particular server were being redirected.” The better your research, the more improved your website's ranking. The main aim of directories is to satisfy Internet users by providing them the exact information that they were looking for. They want content that is not only relevant, but also upgraded according to the latest developments. This is the reason why directory optimization is also known to be an ongoing process. That is to say, providing the relevant information and achieving a higher ranking once is not enough. The website has to be continuously updated to maintain that high position with the search engines. The content of the website holds the most important position when it comes to improving directory rankings. 'Content is king' is a phrase that each one of us, who is acquainted with the workings of SEO, must have heard. The keywords that will be used should fit in well with the flow of the text. Enlighten Internet users with your knowledge and impress them with your interesting writing style and do not bother about the consequences after that. It is necessary to make the content rich in keywords. Though one should also be cautious not to exceed the ideal keyword density, otherwise it may draw the suspicion of spam towards the site and may lead to the site being banned. There are plenty of other negative SEO tactics. In some cases, whether they’re negative or positive really depends on how they’re used, as many of the techniques represent “too much of a good thing.” The Forbes article listed six in addition to Google bowling: * Tattling: Reporting a site to Google for buying links from other sites. * Google insulation: Creating more content than competitors and floating it to the top of Google results. This technique is also used by ReputationDefender to hide online criticism of its clients. * Copyright takedown notices: A negative SEO practitioner may file a copyright complaint with a directory against a competitor, claiming to be the copyright holder. The directory then must remove the page from its index for 10 days while the copyright holder decides whether to sue. This approach can backfire, since someone filing a fraudulent takedown notice can become the subject of a lawsuit. * Duplicate content: Older, more trusted sites can sometimes harm a new competitor by stealing their content. directories hate duplicate content. The hope is that the engines will assume that the newer site duplicated their content and penalize them accordingly – while the older site steals the newer site’s higher position. * Denial of service attack: This basically involves making a competitor’s site unreachable by means of a DoS attack, then attempting to get the directories to index the site while it can’t be reached – thus bumping them out of the index. * Click fraud: I’ve covered this in a number of other articles, so I won’t repeat myself here. There is a need to conduct constant and extensive research to find the keywords that potential users are expected to submit in the search engines. The keywords chosen should be such that it best describes the crux of the entire website. Also, the keywords selected should draw fewer competitive website results, but it should not be so unique that a general user would not even think of that keyword while searching. Technically speaking, it is advisable to go for keywords that draw less than 5000 competitive websites, but is searched at an average of 1000 times per month. Do not forget to incorporate the selected keyword in the header tag, keyword tag, title and in the description tag, including a few times in the actual content of the website. In theory, this shouldn’t work too well, because Google supposedly understands that a site owner can’t actually control who links to their site. In practice, there is at least anecdotal evidence to indicate that Google bowling does happen, and that it works, at least temporarily. Jason Duke, a London-based practitioner of negative SEO quoted in the Forbes article, noted that one of his own sites was hit by this tactic. It lost an estimated five million unique visitors in less than two weeks. Apart from the content and keywords, there are some other factors that greatly influence the rankings of a website on the search engines. Interlinking is a method of promotion that mentions the link of your website to the visitors of another site that has the same theme, and vice versa. This could be a reference link for the users of that website. Uploading numerous articles related to the theme of the website is another standard component included in SEO strategies to enhance the rankings with search engines. These articles can also be submitted with famous article directories that will drive more traffic to the site as the hyperlink of the website can be mentioned in the resource box at the end of the article. At times, the site map of a website can also be of great help in achieving a higher ranking. As the site map lists all the content mentioned on the website, when the SEOs trace the required keyword on the sitemap, they simply index it with the search engines. This enhances the ranking of the website. Another variation of Google bowling simply involves creating thousands of links in a short period of time to the victim’s site across a wide range of social media. To Google and the other search engines, it looks like the victim is engaging in “link spam,” and the automated algorithm may penalize the site accordingly. This is sometimes called “black social bookmarking.” However, there are many SEO consultants who claim to provide top rankings with directories within a few days and they undoubtedly, prove themselves right in claiming that. But, one should remain alert not to be carried away by such claims as there are two techniques of SEO that gives higher rankings - white hat and the black hat SEO technique. While white hat makes use of ethical techniques, black hat employs unfair strategies to achieve the top position with the directories in a matter of a few days. The latter technique is the one that is also employed by SEO consultants who claim a quick higher SEO ranking. For long term benefit, one should always look forward to white hat techniques to avoid any inconveniences such as spamming and other related things. Hence, we can say that SEO serves a two way purpose by providing the user with the required information, and business organizations their soaring profits. Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Another Reason to Hate Bowling I turned up a number of negative SEO methods in my research, but none of them seemed to be as universally hated as Google bowling. Sometimes called a “link of death operation,” Google bowling involves linking the victim’s site to tons of bad neighborhoods such as blatant link farms and using spammy anchor text. Rather than let the directories find these links themselves, an aggressive negative SEO would then submit the link farm pages to the directories so that they’ll see the thousands of bad links in a hurry. 35.12 Tips To Optimize Your Membership Site For Search Engines 1. Use unique content wherever possible PLR and free reprints can be modified to look original to the search engines. To be classed as unique, the copy must be at least 30% different to any other webpage on the internet. In addition to free reprints and PLR, it pays to also create content for your membership site from scratch. Outsource this task to a ghostwriter to save time. You can check the Google Webmaster Guidelines for help when you’re trying to figure out whether that drop in the SERPs might be due to an unintentional violation. If you’ve determined that the drop wasn’t due to something you did (or failed to do), you have a number of options. Before I get to those, however, I’m going to discuss some of the destructive tactics that practitioners of negative SEO might engage in to harm a site’s directory ranking. 2. Add new content regularly To maintain a high page rank with the search engines, and a quality membership site, webmasters need to regularly add new content to their websites. A blog is a great way to add content to your site on a regular basis. Encouraging your members to comment on your blog may give you ideas for follow up blog posts, and will also increase your directory ranking. The first thing you should do is find out whether this slide in the SERPs is something that you’re doing to yourself. Some directories have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some directories now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. Major directories provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization.[17][18][19] Google has a Sitemaps program[20] to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information.[21] As Diane Aull explained in an article on directory Guide, “There are too many potential ‘oopsies’ you could be committing to mention them all: robots.txt that excludes the spiders, unspiderable JS/AJAX navigation, all-Flash no-content splash page, nothing but low-quality links, crappy content with no keywords, same title tag used throughout site, etc.”
Favorite Oil Painting Studios™ All rights reserved