If your competitors are cheating, report them to Google.

Today I’ll take you on step by step discovery tour through one of the most over-optimised websites I’ve ever seen.

Black hat SEO?

You be the judge.

Here’s a rather innocuous looking website I found recently while I was on the phone to a prospective client. It ranks 1st at Google for just about everything to do with ‘Conveyancing’.



Next we have the Google results which show that they’ve been affected by Google Universal Map results for “conveyancing melbourne” bumping them off 1st to 4th. To their credit, their parent is registered for Google’s local search and is actually ranking 2nd (on the map). They also have secured a top ranking with their Google Ad.



The next step is to see what Google Robots saw when they last crawled the site… You can do this by clicking on the “Cached” link…



Next you’ll see a screen which shows us more about how Google ‘sees’ the page… But you’ll need to click on “cached text” to see what the robots “really” saw…



The next screen-shot shows how it all goes a bit pear-shaped. This is clearly in breach of Google’s spam guidelines.




If you look at the source code of the page you’ll see how they’ve used a -noscript- tag to stuff the page full of ridiculous amounts of key phrases. Text in a -noscript- tag is not (usually) visible to humans, but highly visible to search engine robots. This technique can also be used in -noframes- & -div- tags etc.



Then there’s the usual keyword stuffing of image alt tags, but again this is disguised by creating very small images and filling the alt tag with keywords (the image alt tag is used to describe images for usability reasons – i.e. screen readers for the visually impaired)…

Why not test your new skills and repeat the steps above on this domain.

Lesson?

When someone builds your new website and promises to search engine optimise it for you, it pays to ask them just how they intend to do it. You need to read Google’s webmaster guidelines closely and make sure your web design / search engine optimisation company follow the rules to the letter!

It’s your website. It’s your responsibility.

It’s cheaper and easier to remove a competitor than to try and out-optimise them, so I’ll leave you with one final screenshot your competitors will use if they discover you’re engaging in Black-hat SEO, Google’s spam reporting tool.



Chris Thomas heads Reseo a search engine optimisation company which specialises in setting up and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns, Affiliate Programs and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.