Google doesn’t appreciate being fooled, and once it discovers websites using inappropriate optimization techniques it may also punish them by reducing the website’s ranking and even removing the website from its search results altogether. If you’re not sure that what you’re doing is acceptable SEO practice or not, keep in mind the one golden rule: If it’s good for your users, it’s good for Google. Incorporating elements that are for Google’s bot eyes alone usually leads to fishy results. The following is a list of ILLEGITIMATE SEO practices. Here’s what you SHOULD NOT be doing:

Using Redirects to Manipulate Google Page Rank

An illegitimate redirect is a one that occurs automatically when you approach a certain URL. As you click on the link to that site, the page URL (address) will appear for a short while and then automatically redirect you to the main site. This technique is used to increase the number of times the website will appear in search results, as it will appear through different domains.

Google’s crawlers will see a different page than the users, fooling the robot into giving a false page rank.

Not all redirects are considered spam, there are several redirect types that Google accepts and acknowledges, which you can read about in other blog posts here, or through Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

100% Frames

We’ve already discussed iframes here in this blog. Just like the redirect, and the golden principle of SEO, if what your users see is different than what the Google bot sees, it’s a problem. A 100% frame page is a page covered completely by a frame that consists of different content from the rest of the website. End result – Google sees one thing on which it bases its page ranking and the user sees something entirely different.

Just like the redirect, this enables spammers to index the same site over and over again under different domains. While the different domains may have different content and get ranked as a result of that content, the end user will find himself viewing the same main site.

Hiding Texts and Links

If a text is visible to search engines only it is considered spam. So what does Google consider hidden text?

• Any text written in the same color (or close to) as the web page background.
• Any text situated in an area of the page that has been defined as hidden or invisible using CSS.
• Extremely small fonts that are not legible to internet user.
• Any text that is being hidden behind an image.

While you might find this useful, particularly if you don’t want to overload your web design with texts, it may very well backfire at you. It may get you kicked out of the ranking game altogether, not to mention that clicking ctrl-a in the browser may reveal your texts anyway.

Other Illegitimate Practices to Avoid

Spamming the keywords – using the same keyword over and over without any real content involved.

Cloaking – this is a technological ruse. As you enter the website, the website issues a query inspecting your status. If you are discovered as a crawler you will end up seeing a different page than you would have reached as a regular user.

Doorway Pages – these are pages created solely to optimize for a specific word. The chosen keyword is repeated over and over again on this page, suggesting high relevance to search engines. This doorway page will either include a link to the main homepage or it will include an automatic redirect to the homepage. Either way, this doorway is considered unethical SEO practice.

Excessive Linking between Websites – an exaggerated amount of links between two sites. What’s considered exaggerated? Good question. There isn’t a specific number of links and it depends greatly on the balance of the rest of the content. There is higher risk of getting caught when the two sites use the same IP. In general, triangle linking is much better for SEO purposes. This means that if your website is site A, and you sent a link to site B, site B will link to site C and site C will send the link right back to you – site A. Another unethical practice involves a bombardment of links on a single page or website. Link farms are a particularly deplorable practice.

Selling Links for PR

Lately, websites that have integrated a practice where they sell links to other websites (meaning, website x pays website y to include a link to it) have been losing ground fast. This is done in order to increase the page rank and is also considered deceptive.

So, How Will You Be Discovered?

Search engines use three different methods to discover culprit websites. The first is technological. Search engine bots are programmed to uncover some of the more obvious deception techniques. When the crawler runs in to such cases it will raise a ‘red flag’. This will lead to a temporary PRO penalty (in Google). Usually these penalties are only temporary but in certain cases they may become permanent.

Google and the other search engines also encourage users to report unethical website promotion techniques. You can report other websites through a special web page dedicated to this subject. This is Google’s Spam Report page. You need to sign in to use it though.

Forums are another method of discovering SEO scams. Apparently Google employees read webmaster forums and if they run into something suspicious… they do something about it.

Iframes and 301 Redirect

As part of our grand plan to lead you through the various aspects of optimizing your new Wix website we noticed some of you have showed an interest in various aspects of domain forwarding and iframe. Our support team received lots of questions on why their new Flash website isn’t listed in Google and other search engines and when we checked we discovered several cases in which iframes were being used. For this reason, we decided to explain iframes and shed some light on the issue.

Iframes Yes or No

Iframes (or inline frames) allow you to display content from one domain, under a different domain. For example, you’ve built a free website with Wix all about photography and you have another new domain called photography.com. You want all the content you’ve uploaded onto the Wix website to appear under your new ‘photography’ domain. What you do is, you add an iframe into the source of your photography domain and place your Wix website into the iframe. None of the content will appear in your photography domain. Your new domain will appear to have zero content, no fresh content, no links, no updates, nothing. You can add the basic Meta tags, such as title, description and keywords into your photography domain, but that will be the only thing the search engine crawler will see, and as you can read in our previous blog post 7 Super Tips to Getting Google to Crawl Your Site Faster, where there is no content there is no crawler, no indexing and no ranking. Content is Google’s king, bread and butter. In fact, if you visit Google SEO sites you’ll discover that they strongly advise against using frames and iframes in general, as it places you in quite a disadvantage.

Redirecting 301 & Domain Forwarding

The 301 redirect code is an HTTP status code used for redirection. The 301 status code indicates that a resource has been permanently moved to a new location, specified by the ‘location’ header that follows (in the source). What this means is, that the old URL is obsolete and that the crawler should replace any references to the old URL with the newly indicated URL.

What will actually happen is that as you load the web page in the browser you will automatically be redirected to the new location specified in the ‘location’ header. This is a permanent redirect, so when you press the back button, your browser won’t send you back to the original page. Using the 301 redirect also tells search engines that all link equities from the original URL should be credited to the new one. In theory, this also means that the new page will inherit the rankings from the original page.

Let’s take a look and see what happens to your ‘photography’ domain in this case. In practice, your ‘photography’ domain is considered the ‘original’ domain, because that’s where you’re sending your visitors. As they attempt to visit your ‘photography’ site, they are automatically redirected to your Wix Flash website. This means that your Wix website will continue to gain strength, as all the content and links are ascribed to it now, and the original URL, (using the example of the ‘photography’ URL) will lose its ranking.

Summary

After taking a quick glance at the ways in which you have been using iframes and the redirect option for your Flash website, it appears that they are usually used to create an individual domain name.

By using the iframe you lose your page ranking and undermine every optimization effort you’ve made.
By using the 301 domain forwarding you are strengthening the Wix URL instead of your new URL.

Getting your own domain name with Wix is cheap, starting from about $5 a month. Is it really worth the hassle, the trouble and the loss of your page ranking?