How tricking the search engines HURTS your home business

by Steve Shaw ©2001

We're all desperate for more hits - but are you using any tricks to try and leap to the top of the search engine rankings? Do you realize they could do your internet home business more harm than good?

Let's look at some of the more common tricks that many web masters use to try and fool the search engines into ranking their pages more highly:

·        gateway pages - this involves duplicating a page on your site and simply changing the keywords to try and get more visitors to your site. Whilst this technique was fairly successful in 1998 and 1999, it is rapidly becoming ineffective as the search engines get wise to the method and look across all the pages in your site to try and determine an overall theme. These gateway pages will begin to have the effect of diluting the overall subject for your site, and you will find your site rapidly dropping through the rankings. You may get some short term gain, but it is not a sensible long term strategy for your business.

 

·        redirection (bridge) pages - similar to gateway pages, these are pages targetted for particular keywords that immediately redirect visitors to other pages within your site. These are fairly ineffective as many search engines, for example Go, refuse to index any pages with redirection, and some may even remove the site you are redirecting to completely from their listings.

 

·        word spamming - the most common algorithm used to determine a web page's ranking is the frequency and location of a particular keyword or phrase on the page. Some webmasters seek to exploit this by repeating the keyword many times in a row. This technique, along with the others below, is seen as spamming, a serious no-no for anyone serious about the long term success of their business. The most likely outcome if detected is that the web page's ranking will be downgraded or removed from the listing altogether. Just don't do it.

 

·        invisible text - another spamming technique is to make text the same colour as the background, and thereby camouflage keyword saturation from the visitor. Many search engines are able to detect this and see it as spam. They will either refuse to index any such text, or may exclude the whole page from the listings altogether.

 

·        tiny text - this again can be used to cram keywords onto a page by making the font very small in the hope that the visitor won't really notice it. Not only does this look very ugly and unprofessional, a page containing a lot of tiny text will be treated the same as pages containing invisible text. It can only harm your business.

 

So what can you do to reach the dizzy heights of success? The good news is that there are more honest methods to get to the top of a search engine ranking that will bring far more success over the long term for your internet home business. Watch out for a future article on HomeBizzOnline http://www.homebizzonline.com/articles.html !

Article by Steve Shaw of HomeBizzOnline - the one-stop resource for your home internet business. Visit http://homebizzonline.com  for all the advice, tips and tricks you need to make your home internet business successful. Subscribe to Steve's FREE newsletter, The HomeBizzOnline Gazette.