Chapter 8
Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap
In This Chapter
Examining the principles of tricking the search engines
Exploring the basic techniques
Doorway pages, redirects, cloaking, and more
Understanding how you may be penalized
E
veryone wants to fool the search engines. And the search engines know
it. That’s why search engine optimization is such a strange business — a
hybrid of technology and, oh, I dunno . . . industrial espionage, perhaps. The
search engines don’t want you to know exactly how they rank pages because
if you did, you would know exactly how to trick them into giving you top
positions.
Now for a bit of history. When this whole search engine business started out,
the search engines just wanted people to follow some basic guidelines —
make the Web site readable, provide a TITLE tag, provide a few keywords
related to the page’s subject matter, and so on — and then the search engines
would take it from there.
What happened, though, is that Web sites started jostling for position. For
example, although the KEYWORDS meta tag seemed like a great idea, so many
people misused it (by repeating words and using words that weren’t related
to the subject matter) that it eventually became irrelevant to the search
engines. Eventually, the major search engines stopped giving much weight
to the tag or just ignored it altogether.
The search engines try to hide their methods as much as they can, but it
sometimes becomes apparent what the search engines want, and at that
point, people start trying to give it to them in a manner the search engines
regard as manipulative. This chapter discusses what things you should avoid
doing because you risk upsetting the search engines and getting penalized —
potentially even getting booted from a search engine for life!
