It's a SEO Jungle Out There

It's a search engine optimization jungle out there!

There is an Association of Search Engine Spammers, which is a parody site, but they list the various specialties of Search engine spammers and other burdens on webmasters. This list has most of the perils that face webmasters in this area.

FFA Links
FFA or FFALP is a web page with a list of links. The link page could contain several categories to post your link to or it could be topic specific. Many web site owners choose FFA Link pages to build traffic. Some choose FFA Link Pages to gather email addresses.

I am sure that most of you have heard about sites/seo companies affiliated with FFAs getting penalized for participating in such linking activities. In fact the word on the street is that a few of the bigger names in SEO (not to be mentioned here) are highly involved in these linking schemes to get their ranks.

You can get banned from search engines for this.

1. shady 3-4-5 or 10 way links with unrelated sites
Nowadays a lot of people buy links. Buying links with unrelated sites will get you nowhere fast. Sites should be related.

2. link removal of competitors link partners in spoofed e-mail requests
Nasty, nasty. Some people will stop at nothing.If you get a mail from one of your linking partners asking you to remove them - check back with them. The mail may be a fake!

3. sneaky redirects
This is what we call page hijacking

4. 1x1 images with alt tags keyword stuffed to the max
Our Keyword spamming involving alt tags

5. Spyware
Downloading known or home made spyware to the browsers of unsuspecting surfers

6. Doorway Pages
Making one targeted page that redirects to the site you want to push

7. Spam Forums, wiki's and blogs
This has become very popular and I figure the search engines will clamp down on it real soon.

8. Feeder Sites
Another word for doorway pages

9. Mirror Websites
Multiple copies of a site, usually for redundancy and on different servers, are called mirror sites. Registering such sites can be seen as spam by some search engines, and it wise to let only the primary site be crawled. So you can do these if you send traffic other than direct SE traffic, and make sure they aren't crawled. You also need to make sure the casino allows these.

10. Spamdexing other names
This is using your site's URL in sites that are search engine spam. It creates so many backlinks that you can get banned for it.

11. 302 Redirects
This exploit allows any webmaster to have his own "virtual pages" rank for terms that pages belonging to another webmaster used to rank for. Successfully employed, this technique will allow the offending webmaster ("the hijacker") to displace the pages of the "target" in the Search Engine Results Pages ("SERPS"), and hence (a) cause search engine traffic to the target website to vanish, and/or (b) further redirect traffic to any other page of choice.

12. Code Swapping
Optimizing a page for top ranking, then swapping another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

13. Sellers of fake pagerank text links

14. nofollow tags on all our reciprocal links
Another Nasty. Some affs exchange links with others and then turn around and add nofollow tags, so the links do not count towards the other webmasters backlinks. The nasty person has incoming links, but none outgoing.

15. nobots.txt ban on reciprocal links
This has the same effect as nofollow tags.

16. Submitting sites to 1.5 million search engines that require an e-mail address
This is a way to load down your competitors mail with spam.

17. Promotion of SEO owned domains rather than clients
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf.

However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

18. Own a scraper site that steals Search Engine Traffic from other sites
A scraper site, on the other hand, adds no value of its own; it merely steals or borrows search results from another source and uses them as filler for an ad page

if this site is using a redirect link with your URL listing as source and redirects to an inside page on their site where they "appear" to list sites but that site's title or domain name is in the title of that page (BEWARE!!!! it will steal your traffic)

19. Own a scraper site that not only steals traffic but rewrites adsense id's to their own
The same as above, steals your content and rewrites adsense codes or affiliate sodes in general to their own. So the content including the ads is yours, but the aff code is theirs.

20. Click fraud on competitions ads
This is an old one from the PPC era - click your competitors ads at infinitum

21. Buying domain for the sole intent of discarding it before grace period for PPC spam
This is very common now - get a new domain, get it listed in PPCs, add gambling links, toss the whole domain before the grace period, do it over with a new domain. I guess it works, a lot of work though, and a lot of domains to go through...

22. Promise clients #1 for any keyword.
Now, we all know you can't promise this in our industry. Not even if you are a top Black hatter. The only way this can happen is if you get included in someone's site that is already there.

Black Hat Marketing Series

  1. What is Black Hat SEO
    How to identify black hat search engine optimization and how to avoid it.
  2. Grey Hat is the Old Black Hat
    What SEO tactics used widely in the past by Webmasters, have now lost their usefulness.
  3. It's a Search Engine Optimization Jungle Out There
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.

  4. Black Hat SEO or Search Engine Spamming
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.

  5. Black Hat in the Gambling Industry
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  6. Are YOU Being Negatively Affected by Black Hat Site
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.
  7. Why not use white hat SEO?
    SEO schemes and scams to be knowledgeable and aware of, so you do not get taken advantage of.