Web Site Promotion

How to Be a Search Engine Jerk

You can get your Web site set up to be friendlier to search engines-or you can set it up to manipulate search engines and try to get your Web page the highest listings and most hits possible. The second course isn't a good idea, because these techniques can get you kicked out of search engines. We advise you to avoid the following courses of action unless you want to be known as a Search Engine Jerk, and, more importantly, risk losing your place in the search engines.

1. Add keywords that have nothing to do with your site

Some people add keywords to their META tags that have nothing to do with the content of their site. The theory is the more keywords they have, the more hits they'll get in the search engine and the more people will visit their site. But this is a silly idea. The extra people who visit their sites will be visiting because of keywords that have nothing to do with the content, so they're not likely to be interested in the content. Furthermore, they're unlikely to look kindly upon the Web site owner for playing such a trick.

2. Add multiple instances of keywords to your META tags

Instead of adding a keyword one time in your META tags, you might add the same keyword ten or fifteen times. That's one way to try "keyword stuffing" and most of the time, it won't work--spiders are too smart for that. (Note that putting "dogs,dogs,dogs dogs" in your description META tag is not okay. However, putting "German Shepherds, Welsh Terriers, Boxers" is okay-as long as your page has something to do with each of these breeds.)

3. Use copyrighted or trademarked terms in your META tags

SEJ's might use copyrighted or trademark terms to which they are not entitled as META tag descriptions. For example, if they've set up a site to promote one particular brown fizzy drink, they might use the names of other brown fizzy drinks to attract visitors to their site. At best they'll be deceiving visitors. At worst--and this is pretty bad--they'll be sued for misuse of a trademark.

4. Add invisible words to the bottom of your pages.

Sometimes to increase the incidence of keywords on a page, Webmasters resort to a sneaky form of keyword stuffing. They set up text the same color as the page background--so viewers can't ordinarily view it, and add lines and lines and lines of keywords. (In the search-engine business this is sometimes called fontmatching.) This could get your page-and sometimes your entire Web site-kicked out of search engines. Some spiders also consider a preponderance of very small text as possible evidence of keyword stuffing, so be careful how much tiny text you're using on a page.

5. Set up multiple entrances to the same site.

Other Web sites set up several copies of the same page so they'll show up in several places on a search engines results list. These pages are often known as doorway pages. There's a chance that using these will get you into trouble with the search engines, but we'll look at this subject in detail in a moment.

6. Title Stacking

Title Stacking (also called Title Packing) is when you use a perfectly legitimate way to enhance your search engine ranking-that is, using a title tag-in a nefarious manner. Specifically, you use several title tags at a time, like this:

<Title>The Best Example Title Tags Online</Title>
<Title>Thousands of Free Example Title Tags</Title>
<Title>Learn All About Example Title Tags</Title>

The theory is that search engines will add the information from all the title tags. It probably won't work anymore-if it ever did-and it might get you into trouble with the search engines, so don't do it.

In Conclusion...

All of these techniques may work in the short run. But they'll cost you a lot more in the long run by wrecking your credibility, attracting to your site visitors you don't want, and getting your site kicked out of a lot of search engines.