Competitors Using Blackhat SEO?

As an SEO company, we find sites using Black Hat SEO techniques almost every day.

I guess Black Hat SEO can be defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Black hat SEO techniques usually include one or more of the following characteristics:

• breaks search engine rules/terms of services
• creates a poor user experience directly because of the black hat SEO techniques utilized on the Web site
• unethically presents content in a different visual or non-visual way to search engine spiders and search engine users.

Simply put, using Black Hat SEO techniques can give you an unfair ranking advantage over other websites.

Even some of the biggest companies in Australia are up to no good. Jim Stewart highlighted black hat SEO techniques Fairfax Online Network use on dozens of their websites (like www.wedding.com.au) – The black hat technique used by Fairfax appears intentional, but it may be a developer error! Anyway, view Jim’s very interesting exposé video here.

Smaller players also find it tempting.

Here’s a site which is ranking number 1 at Google for its declared search term and has white on white text all over the home page, including keyword flooding. Visit the site, click somewhere on the page (which isn’t a link) and Ctrl A (select all) – you’ll see what I mean.

I mean this is the oldest trick in the black hat SEO book, and there’s not a penalty within cooee!
Seriously I could ‘out’ websites all day long...

But black hat SEO has a much darker side, as many thousands of British consumers discovered last week.

Scotland Yard shut down hundreds of websites selling counterfeit goods online. One example was counterfeit Ugg Boots, where 400 ecommerce websites were shut down almost instantly.

As I write this about 6 of the top 10 sites listed in the top 10 at Google.co.uk for the search term “Ugg Boots” are inaccessible.

What’s interesting is that the owner(s) of these websites were very well versed in Blackhat SEO and they used all sorts of dodgy black hat techniques to get their websites to rank highly in the results.

Some had even hacked or have friends who work within the Chinese Government and various education websites and obtained back-links to their website!

There are no visible links on this page for example, http://www.hztc.edu.cn/www/english/Introduction.htm but there are dozens hidden behind the main banner image.



In spite of repeated spam complaints that I’ve personally lodged with Google in the last three years, I have yet to see one single website using black hat SEO be penalised.

Putting it bluntly, if Google’s so called web spam filters actually worked, then many thousands of British consumers wouldn’t have been ripped off.

At the end of the day it’s comes down to trust perception. If the current situation continues, people are going to be less inclined to trust the Google results. And when that happens, people tend to start using different search engines.

I seriously think that it’s got to the point where Google’s run up the white flag, so it occasionally slaps a big branded website (like BMW Germany, or Flight Centre) to make a high profile example. They then get some publicity as the media machine cranks out the free PR, which in turn sends a few shivers down the spines of smaller website owners, who in turn pull in their heads for a few weeks, before going all over again.

For you I have two recommendations;

1. DO NOT under any circumstances take the “if you can’t beat them join them approach”! You have to think that ‘eventually’ black hat SEO techniques website owners are getting away with at the moment might be banned at anytime as Google tightens the algorithm.
2. If you’re got spare 5 minutes to waste, fill in the web spam complaint form.

Personally, I’ve stopped bothering.

What do I do if my competitors are buying links?

Since the dawn of time, people have tried to cut corners by cheating to get an unfair advantage in nearly all aspects of life, business, pleasure and sport.

I suppose it could be argued that cheating is just a form of systems testing. Someone tries to beat the system and someone else tries to either set up a system of detection or plug the loop hole(s). Just ask the tax department, the drugs in sport people, and in our world, Google.

We find SEO cheats almost every day; it naturally comes along with the job.

These days it’s less about hidden text etc, and more and more in the form of paid links.

As you’re aware, links from one website to another website form the foundations of Google’s algorithm and has set Google apart from every other “meta” based search engine. Frankly, it’s difficult to perceive what the internet would be like had Larry Page not made the connection between academic papers and links between websites.

Obviously a paid link is a link given in exchange for money, rather than a genuine vote of ‘link confidence or approval’ of another person’s content.

It’s no secret Google hates paid links. Matt Cutts (head of Google’s web spam) has been very concerned about this for several years now simply because it can compromise the quality of Google’s search results. He noted that paid links to brain cancer information sites could actually be highly damaging in terms of the quality of the information on those sites and outright dangerous in some cases!

So what does a paid link normally look like?

One of the things we do when optimising a client's website is to look at the back-links of competitors who out-rank our client. We look for opportunities to obtain links from their link partners to start a ‘link negation' process while at the same building as many high quality links as we can find.




We recently found what we think is a paid link when we were examining a page with a list of helpful business links on topics such as marketing, economics analysis and legal sites. Under the title of "Other Sites" was a link to an online pharmacy selling Viagra. This made me very suspicious.

There's a chance that TPG's website has been hacked and those links have been put up amongst some legitimite ones.

In any case, I have submitted this page to Google’s ‘Report paid links’ facility in Webmaster Tools for Google to investigate. If you suspect someone is buying or selling links you can do the same.



The point is, it’s important to obtain links as ethically as possible, from your suppliers, directories etc. When an SEO company sees links like the ones above to competitors, we’re obliged to act in the interests of our clients’ (and hopefully make the web a better place at the same time!).

So if you see competitors buying links through link buying websites or similar, report them (if they’re not declared “sponsor links” or don’t include a rel=”nofollow” tag) and hope Google’s continued refinements to its algorithm discounts them.

Australian Financial Review - Digital Rights Management and SEO

One of the guys here at work today (Anthony) visited the Australian Financial Review website www.afr.com.au. Anthony was reading one of their articles, and as is his want, was highlighting the page copy as he was reading.

He noticed the page text was 'switching out' every second character. It's probably best explained with some screenshots (I love screen shots). Here's the normal version of the site.



The next screen shot shows what happens if you swipe the text (to try and copy it):



Try it yourself here

This is a html form of Digital Rights Management. For the more technically minded, basically what AFR has done is use two floating div tags each containing every second character, which, when overlayed make the text read normally. It's only when you swipe the text that the system comes into play, because you're just swiping one layer.

It potentially creates a strain on your server as it's working hard putting the whole thing together each time a page is called. It would also send your bandwidth through the roof!

It also has it's SEO pros and cons, so lets go through the implications if you decide to protect your content with this system.

1. This technique is SEO unfriendly!

If we take a sneak peak at the source code, there's no way Google's going to index this page effectively.

Ever.

Here's an example of the source code:
I don’t think google will like this… (or any other search engine for that matter)



If you don't want your content in Google's index, use a robots.txt file to keep the Googlebot out (very useful for subscriber / members only content).

And given the way that Google handles duplicate content (it gives gives first 'dibs' to the web page where the Googlebot first found unique content and ignores any other page with the same or highly similar content), I don't really see the point in using this system.

To make sure your content gets indexed first, set up a xml sitemap in Google webmaster tools, and make sure that when you publish something new, Google knows about it seconds after it's gone live.

In other words, even if someone else copied and published AFR content on their website or Blog, Google would simply ignore it.

Besides... it's easy to steal content. Ever heard of a 'screengrab'? (see above!).

2. This is a usability disaster. Not everyone online can see.

Beth (a collegue) also chipped in... What happens when someone with a screen reader comes through? They get this:

A s r l a n N w e l n B n i g r u f u m x d h m r e b f r C r s m s i h s r t g p e e t t o p o l i i g h t h b n 's s a b s n s w u d r w o 0 e c n o p o i s n i e e r . F o 7 e c n t d y. e t e e a n m j r c u s t o o t e o i o a d o e x s i g u i e s s o l e e b s l .

Mmmm.

Finally, one of our clever developers spent 10 minutes to create a script which renders the whole AFR digital rights 'thing' useless. Sorry, we won't be offering that for download!

Do you have any other thoughts?

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.