Three things you should NEVER do

(even if some slick-talking "expert"

tells you it will cost you only $499

and will guarantee you gaggles of customers)

By David Leonhardt

A webmistress asked me recently how much I would charge to optimize her site for the search engines. I took a glance at her site, and the first thing I found was a hidden link to an association she was part of.

I asked her why the link was there. She told me it was "for the search engines." It never ceases to amaze me how much really bad - I mean absolutely horrible - advice is floating around the Internet.

She never did hire me, but she did walk away with one free piece of advice that I now share with you: "Remove that link ASAP." Hidden links and hidden text are big trouble and something you should never do.

A hidden link is simply a link the search engine robots would follow, but is not visible to the naked eye. It could be a one pixel by one pixel graphic the same color as the background. Hidden text could be keyword written in the same color as the background.

If a search engine detects text in the same color as the background, it might penalize or even ban your site. In fact, one search engine expert has even suggested that if your background is, say, white, and you have a black table with white text on your page, that search engines would read that as hidden text (white background, white text) even though the text is clearly visible in the black table. Hmm. I will have to revisit my own site's colors.

Why are hidden links and hidden text bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Duplicate pages are also a no-no. Search engines like original content made for human visitors. Five pages with the same article are seen as spamming, even if you did change "bicycle repair" to "fix your bike" in the second version and to "bike repair" in the third.

I was asked to exchange links with four websites this one person owned. The sites are very wholesome and I believe the webmaster is too. But the link pages on each website are identical: same introductory text and same links in the same order with identical wording each. All it would take is one complain to get all four sites banned, or at very least, severely demoted at Google and other search engines.

Needless to say, I turned down the offer, so that my site would not be associated with a "bad neighborhood".

Why are duplicate pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Doorway pages are also bad. A doorway page is a page carefully designed to do well on search engine results, but is never meant to be used by humans. Often there is then a link to a website or there is some form of redirect.

Why not just optimize your site for the keywords you want, rather than try to trick the search engines? It probably will cost you less to hire a good search engine optimizer, and your website will not get banned.

I was approached by someone offering a combination of doorway pages and link farming (another no-no!). He did not call them by those names, even insisting they were not doorway pages. He wanted a few hundred dollars a month. There's nothing like your friendly neighborhood mortician coming to call when business is slow and bearing his own special brew for you to sample.

Why are doorway pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

By the way, "doorway pages" should not be confused with "entry pages". I get lots of my traffic entering through one or another of my articles. But these are real articles with real content, designed for human eyes and optimized for the search engines. This is a good tactic, because it adds content (which is what search engines are looking for).

Hidden links and text, duplicate pages and doorway pages are just a few of the "clever" tactics that can land you in the "Search Engine Slammer". If you spend much time on the Internet, you'll be approached about many others sooner or later.

Here is a simple question to ask yourself: "Would this be helping the search engines deliver the best results, or would it be trying to cheat their rules?" If it feels a little funny, don't try it. Or ask someone who knows.

Search engines are your friends. Be nice to them, and they'll be nice to you. You might just land yourself a berth atop Mount Google.

About the Author

David Leonhardt is an effective, professional seo consultant and a website marketing consultant. For a free quote, call 613-448-3931, or send us an email.




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Google Panda Algorithm Update, Article Marketing And How To Write Articles

by Peter Nisbet

Article marketing will live on, but you may have to learn how to write articles differently after the Google Panda algorithm update. Some call it the Farmer update, but that is just one guy's name for it - Google named it Panda, so Panda it is. What did this Panda algorithm update achieve?

Panda is an update to Google's search engine algorithm, that determines what web pages should be indexed and where these pages should appear in the results pages offered to people using specific search terms to find information. In a nutshell, it changed the way Google looked at web pages and listed them and in turn, the way that online marketers used article marketing.

The main change was to put more emphasis on the site as a whole, and to remove web pages that failed to offer expert information on the topic. If an article seems shallow in content, and does not appear to be written by an expert, if it appears sloppy and not well researched, if it is short or fails to offer information other than what is obvious, then Panda might well decide it does not deserve a listing.

Keep in mind that Google's main objective is to provide Google users that are using the search engine to find useful and authoritative information on the topic defined by their search term. It does not take your article marketing strategies into account, and if Google's algorithm calculates that your page content or article is not offering useful and authoritative information then don't expect it be listed.

So how to you write articles to meet the needs of Google's customers - not Google, take note, but Google's customers! Those who understand how to write articles after Panda will know that they should write only on those topics they know a fair bit about. Article marketing has returned to the domain of the writer rather than the plagiarist or the spinner.

Fudging and waffle will no longer work, no matter how many keywords you sprinkle about in it, and this signifies the end of many fairly expensive eBooks out there that explains how to create meaningless articles, and also of many forms of spinning software that will generate articles of little meaning and certainly no chance of being listed.

Article spinning is on its way out due to the Google Panda algorithm update no matter what the software designers try to tell you - straight from Google's mouth! Give up spinning and start writing your own articles with substance; with a lack of similarity to thousands of other articles and with some unique or at least meaningful information useful to Google's customers.

Articles of below 400 words will no longer be acceptable, and you are recommended to write from 500-800 words if you want Google to list your articles or web pages. Ezine Articles no longer accepts fewer than 400 words - I think the minimum should be 500, but I was also one of those that complained about articles of under 400, so I got my way.

How to write articles after Google Panda? Easy! Write about a topic you know or care about, write well with good grammar and spelling (bad grammar is no longer acceptable in article marketing), structure your article properly, making it absolutely clear what you are writing about, and try to be original without copying other articles. Do all of that then perhaps your article will be accepted for publication, and if it is then you also have a chance of it being listed by Google.

Acceptance and listings are no longer guaranteed, and large numbers of Ezine Articles submissions are being refused when they would have been accepted for publication prior to Panda. Most of these substandard articles have been removed from Google's index and hence its listings, and also from the directories' databases.

Article marketing is getting close to being honest again, with genuine writers writing genuine articles without recourse to software spinners or scrapers plagiarizing or copying from other articles published online. Google has got wise to you, so get honest, with clear and honest information, and you will be rewarded. Anything else and you will be punished if you do not know how to write articles properly - particularly after the Google Panda update.

Further information on article marketing and how to write articles can be found on Pete's website http://www.article-services.com where you will also find details of Pete's article ghostwriting services.

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