Search Engines Internet Cheats
INTERNET CHEATS
What They Do and How They Do It
Create a great idea like the internet, and sure enough there will those who wish to grab more than their fair share. This section is dedicated to identifying some of the tactics used by both ignorant, and deliberately underhanded, web marketers to improve their own ranking, and in some cases force the competitors website out of search engine searches. Thankfully the search engines are getting better at identifying the cheats, but the the more able we become at internet marketing, the greater the importance of being aware of the tactics.
You do your search engine optimisation perfectly, follow all the rules to the letter, and with great delight you find your site up there with the top 10, but suddenly, your website vanishes out of the Google Index and you haven't the foggiest idea why.
You've probably been zapped by a Link Bomber!
Link Bombers, also known as "Google Bombers", know how to knock our website out of Google ranking by using mass linking. They take advantage of these important rules of Google that can lead to disqualification:
- A website should not have more than 100 new links to it, from any source, in one day
- The incoming keyword anchor links have more impact to the listing of your web page, than those optimised upon it
- Duplicate copy will be disqualified for spamming
So all I have to do to bring your website down is to spam you to death with too many links, say through an illegal website or a hearty session of blogging or forum posts with a link to your website in the post or ...
I could make the legal number of posts in a similar fashion, every day for a month, but use different keyword links to point to your website or ...
I'll build a dirty great website with thousands of links and great chunks of your optimised copy contained within, and insert the "noindex/follow" and "no cache" command in the meta tags, (or place it into the secure https area of an unused website) so my rogue site will be invisible to users and Google alike, thus virtually impossible to detect ...
But I wouldn't do that for two reasons ... one because of ethics ... the other is because all name-servers and their websites are now recorded on a daily basis and their actiivities stored in giant computer storage systems - infact you can view how this website looked back in 1995 if you wish! (Might be a bit fuzzy due to the change in browser technology.) Man ... I just wouldn't risk it, as a rogue marketer could be blacklisted for life!
How To Detect and Protect from Link Bombers
In most CPanels of Hosting Accounts there is a Tool called "Awstats", which provides daily statistical information about who visits your website, their IP Address and in particular who links a URL to your site. The professional can be very slick at disguising their links in bogus search sites, and forums that require a sign up login, but these statistics over a period of time, can give you a good insight as to who is doing the spamming.
Firstly use the "Block" IP Address Facility also found in your CPanel, this will convert the domain address of the offender into an IP Address then block users and bots from visiting your website to cause harm. Caution: Make sure you are not blocking a large chunk of the internet, e.g. Bigpond! You can check who owns the IP Address at www.domaintools.com, and if it belongs to a dedicated server - you are in luck!
Then conduct a Whois Domain Search for the owner of the website and provide these details with the offending search results, when you Report Their Behaviour to Google.
Thankfully the search engines appear to have ceased to acknowledge the "noindex/follow" commands, so offendors can often be detected using "Who Links to me or Link Popularity" Programs.
Should you suspect that your website has vanished from good rankings for no good reason, select a well optimised couple of paragraph of text from your website and do a search for this in Yahoo, and often you will find the offender.
Report the idiots to Search Engines (details can be found how to do this in Marketing Tools) and hopefully all of their work will be black banned for life! One less competitor.
When it get's really bad, and you experience the same stalkers that we deal with at Splash, then you will be wise to invest in a dedicated server, of which I will write about in more depth in a later part of this program (when I am certainly tanked on red wine probably!)
Yahoo and MSN don't rate incoming links, so it really doesn't matter to them as much.
Another way that competitors can steal your optimised thunder is to grab an image that resides on your website, and place it into their own - this can be a tiny image that could be disguised in their CSS code. Use the Hotlink Tool to prevent other websites (other than those you approve) from utilising your images on their websites, this at least stops the image from showing, but unfortunately, rogue sites don't care if they can be seen or not, so your detective work will be helpful when you Report Their Behaviour to Google, and the other Search Engines too.
Internet Spam
Spam is a word they introduced into the Geek language to describe anything that would provide nuisance and annoyance utilising the internet. There is so much to discuss in Internet Spam that I have dedicated two whole pages to it.
