Search Engine Optimization FAIL

Thursday, August 6th, 2009 | E-commerce |

I had lunch last week with someone who wanted to pick my brain about online marketing. One of the things I told him was to beware of solicitations from search engine optimization companies. I had dealt with a few and found that most were sleazy fly-by-night operations that promised the world in writing and then got out of their contracts by the expediency of shutting their doors.

Worse, some unscrupulous SEO companies use techniques that can get you banned from Google. And then I see this…

SEO Fails Bigger In Texas:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) is running for governor, but her website has suffered Google and Yahoo’s death penalty and has been removed from the search index. The reason: Hutchison’s webmaster embedded thousands of invisible search-terms in the site in a bid to game search-engines; among them was the phrase “rick perry gay” (Rick Perry is Hutchison’s Democrat Republican opponent). The campaign claims the terms were generated automatically by “search engine optimization” software (SEO is a form of Google-Kremlinology in which firms attempt to figure out how to game search engines’ ranking algorithms, rather than trying to create the best, most interesting website they can and assuming that the engines will figure out how to highly rank their material).

ABC News also covered the story and highlighted some other examples of Google delisting Web sites for banned SEO practices. One such Web site was for BMW Germany. They were using doorway pages which showed one Web site to human visitors and a different Web site to Google’s spider.

LATER: Speaking of sleazy SEO marketing, overnight this post was trackback-spammed by two SEO sites (that were both operated by the same company) that seem to scan the Web for SEO-related content and send auto-trackbacks. Like I said, it’s an industry with a lot of sleazy people.

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