Google shows true might…are you at risk?

Flicking through the threads in my rssreader today, I found a post at Matt Cutts Blog (Google Engineer) regarding BMW. Now as many of you know Google is the Search Engine to aim for when looking for volume of traffic. However the days are gone when it was easy to rank in the top ten and using a few questionable techniques would almost guarantee you a top spot. These techniques are known as Black Hat and there are still many companies and individuals who practice these. Google has been cracking down on “Black Hat” and the following case has the largest media coverage so far:

Matt found the BMW site was violating Google’s Webmaster quality guidelines; specifically the following “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.” As such they have now been kicked out to the index and will have to do a re inclusion request once they have cleaned the site up and find out who created the doorway pages!

So what was the issue?

As he explains in his Blog, search engine ‘bots’ arriving at the following www.bmw.de/bmw-neuwagen.html would see a page full of keyword-loaded text, which had been optimised to ensure a high search engine ranking. But what the googlebot saw and what was shown to the visitors were two quite different pages, as a piece of JavaScript would immediately redirect visitors to a completely different website. (See Blog for illustrations).

Keyword-optimised ‘fake’ pages created purely to attract search engine robots are known as ‘doorway’ or ‘gateway’ pages and have long been employed by many seedy industries to boost the rankings.

Are you at risk of being dumped by Google?

So you have taken the route of SEOing your site or have employed a company/individual to do it for you. Here are some points to note below: 

Costs can vary immensely, so do your homework of the going rates.
Make sure you don’t have duplicate content on your site, this can dampen your rankings or if it is really bad get you delisted!

Don’t use any of the following techniques:

Cloaking, redirection, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, anchor text stuffing, hidden text, spamming link directories or Blogs to name a few. 

If you have employed someone, check the work; ask to see what he or she has done for their money! 

It is a long road these days and there are many pitfalls along the way, so don’t get sucked into all this GUARANTEED rankings rubbish it simply isn’t true IMHO.

If you stick to the Google guidelines you will rank well in Yahoo and MSN too (in my experience) it just may take a long time, so be patient.Contact me if you feel you are being duped and I will try and point you in the right direction.