Though unknown in Merseyside, Manchester or the rest of the United Kingdom, JC Penney is undoubtedly one of America’s largest department store chains.

However, during the run up to Christmas 2010, it came top with startling regularity in search engine queries such as ‘bedding’, queries for which other stores such as (more…)

Since the dawn of SEO, website owners have been using the trick of hiding text on their pages to fool the search engines. By making the text the same colour as the background, or concealing it through the use of CSS, website owners can fill their pages with as many keywords as they wish without hindering the look, or the readability, of their websites.

But does it work? Can you actually get away with hiding text on your website and achieve decent Google rankings as a result?

Well, if it didn’t work, people wouldn’t still do it. We see countless websites that have had text concealed within their pages, stuffed with keywords (and often placed with h1 tags) for the purposes of fooling Google and, quite, often those websites (more…)

Friday the 13th

It’s the scary season once again; a time for dressing up as something ghastly and making merry in a ghoulish manner while handing out candy to children… that sounded better in my head.

Any way, it’s Halloween and while the celebratory day of All Hallow’s Eve may not be quite as big over here in the UK as it is in the US (they’ve been preparing for it for weeks) we Brits still use the event as an excuse for a party and to watch horror films. As with any Halloween, there are a lot of new horror movies coming out especially to scare the bejesus out of you and, just like any event of any significance, the black hat SEOs are there too, waiting to surprise you with their fiendish traps.

Online security firm PandaLabs has revealed that Halloween movie releases may lead to (more…)

Don’t panic, this isn’t a story about android life-forms in Russia that are being attacked by Trojans. Well, actually, it is… in a way. The androids in question refer to Android Smartphones, and they are located in Russia. They are also being attacked by Trojans as a direct result of a highly effective SEO strategy.

Trojans prepare to attack Russian androids

The Trojan is a very costly application that Smartphone users in Russia are being tricked into installing on their phones when they search for adult related content. The makers of the Trojan have promoted it on (more…)

Most people with a passing interest in SEO have heard of the phrase ‘black hat’, though not everyone knows what it means or what it entails. It certainly doesn’t mean wandering around the Wild West sporting a lovely black hat while telling people to get off their horse, before giving them a taste of your ‘shoot’n irons’.

No, black hat means something much worse. It means to conduct SEO practices it a dodgy, underhand manner and to ignore the rules of fair play laid down by Google and the other search engines (mostly Google to be honest, but we don’t want to appear biased).

Now you may be thinking that using black hat tactics and getting one over on the search engines is a good idea. They’ve loads of money and they’re too big anyway, we may as well do our best to slip one past them. You would of course be wrong, very wrong. More wrong in fact than the decision to remake ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’, another example of wearing a hat and doing bad deeds.

While getting one over on ‘the man’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing, donning your black hat and selling your soul to the devil isn’t going to set your website up for years of top rankings and quality traffic. When you engage in black hat tactics, or worse yet – hire the SEO services of an agency that uses them – you could be getting (more…)