One of the clients I provide consultancy to has been using two web development companies for some time now. When one is busy, he uses the other. It has worked well for all concerned.
He called me recently for advice. One of those companies was now promising to get the website for his latest venture to position one, on page one, of Google for searches done for that type of business. (For a fee, of course).
What had him confused was they were talking about running two sites – the real one on the new venture’s domain (let’s call it www.newnew.ie) was up and running and another on their own domain (www.webweb.ie/NewNew) was ready to be released.
I read the mails they had sent him and took a good look at both sites.
Here is what they were doing:
- They claimed to have researched the new venture’s sector and determined a number of keywords.
- www.newnew.ie had 12 pages, with quite an amount of images and very concise text. www.webweb.ie/NewNew on the other hand was seen to have 60 pages, each having a considerably large amount of text.
- Each page on www.webweb.ie/NewNew was dedicated to one of the keywords.
This is termed keyword stuffing.
Google says “keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience …
For example, a page about rubber ducks might read something like “Welcome to our rubber ducks page. We sell all types of rubber ducks. Our rubber ducks are made of rubber and resemble real ducks. While yellow rubber ducks are very popular so too are red rubber ducks …”
Google are right about the negative user experience – face it, reading this would drive anyone insane!
Yahoo! concurs:
Some of what Yahoo! considers Unwanted:
- Pages built primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords
- Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience
- Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking
- There were no links from www.webweb.ie/NewNew to www.newnew.ie. However, the contact email address provided was for www.newnew.ie
So called doorway pages are large numbers of pages with repetitious or wordy content that contain many occurrences of a particular word or phrase. The intention is to attract users searching for that phrase then drive them toward a certain area on that site or another.
While this was not the case here it was similar in that the user’s enquiry and potential business would be driven to the newnew.ie email address and Newnew, the company, respectively.
Cloaking is a system whereby different content is served to users than to search engines. This is achieved by detecting who is requesting a page is and returning a set of content accordingly. For example, a user gets a Flash page while the search engine gets text.
Again, technically this was not the case here – search engines would see both sites – but the user would likely only discover one site.
I advised the client not to proceed. Such practices do more harm than good.
- Users finding the second site would get annoyed at the repetitious content and leave.
- Google and Yahoo! could discover the keyword stuffing and remove the second site from their indices.
- A competitor could report the site to the search engines and the same would happen.
- In the worst case scenario, the search engines could also blacklist the genuine site.
My personal golden rule for SEO is “cater for the user first and foremost – the search engines come second”. It is all well and good getting visitors to your site, but only quality content will keep them there.
