Eyjafjallajökull volcano not used by black hat SEOs

Its name may look like someone has dropped a paperweight on their keyboard, but the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has been dominating news headlines for the last week or so due to the impact it has had on Europe.

Now, when a major news event such as this usually comes around, such as the death of Michael Jackson or the death or Brittany Murphy, the black hat SEOs get right on the case and start optimising their spam and virus sites to catch people looking for more news. However, in the case of Eyjafjallajökull – the black hat SEO community has been somewhat quiet.

Can you guess why?

That’s right, no one can spell the darn thing. Eyjafjallajökull is probably the biggest news story of the last decade that hasn’t had any impact at all on black hat SEO. Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Birmingham, London and other cities in the UK may be cut off in terms of air travel – something that even a major terrorist scare (more…)

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Hackers turning to SEO to spread viruses and links

According to recent research from Sunbelt Software, SEO is being heavily used by hackers in order to spread malware, viruses and imbed links into high profile websites.

The report found that hackers were making use of content and topical events to boost their spam websites in the search engine listings, enabling them to spread viruses and Trojans quicker. Events such as the death of Brittany Murphy were capitalised upon, so that unsuspecting web users who searched for news of her death were presented with virus infected pages.

The events surrounding US golfer Tiger Woods were also used by hackers to spread malware to users looking to read about his exploits.

Sunbelt Software discovered that the following searches in December were particularly dangerous for (more…)

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Someone special is making their rounds tonight!

father christmas It’s December 24th, Christmas Eve, and someone very special will be making their rounds tonight. They’ll be travelling all over the world, visiting everyone they can, all in a single night. As ever though, they’ll only visit the good boys and girls, not the bad ones, and bring them good tidings and rewards for their behaviour over the last 12 months.

Who are we talking about?

Google of course… were you thinking of someone else?

Google will be visiting every website tonight, as it does pretty much every day, indexing them and updating its search engine results pages (SERPs), rewarding those boys and girls who have been good and have optimised their website with white hat, ethical SEO.

If you’ve left a treat out for Google, such as some new, fresh content (sadly Google doesn’t eat mince pies, though some Google engineers have been known to (more…)

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Spam comments and SEO

Most SEO professionals know that link building is an important part of any SEO strategy. It’s also fairly well known that building links from relevant websites is better than links from irrelevant websites.

For example, if you’re in the SEO industry, links from other SEO websites would be better for your rankings than links from websites that sell ice cream. Because of this, many people (SEO experts or otherwise) actively engage in link building techniques on the Internet.

One link building technique is the laborious, but worthwhile, tactic of visiting blogs and forums and making posts, using your website in your signature or website field. A good quality comment left on a relevant website, linking back to your website, can do wonders for your rankings and also great things for your reputation online. Making insightful comments can enhance your reputation as an expert in your field.

However, posting spam comments on a number of blogs can harm your reputation in the field. Some SEO companies utilise black hat tactics whereby the same comments are left on websites as part of a link building tactic. These comments have little or no relevance to the actual post, and they are the same on every single website. Their purpose is to act as a link back to the client, but all they do is raise awareness to the use of spam tactics.

For example, this comment was left on one of our posts here at StuckOn:

Name: sue
URL: seosuite.com
Email: waterful517@gmail.com
Submitted on 2009/12/03 at 4:50am

Thanks for the very helpful information about SEO. I enjoyed reading your article and I found it very interesting. Staying tuned for more.

At first glance, it seems like a relevant comment. It uses the term SEO and it has been posted on an SEO blog. However, the non specific nature of the comment should set the alarm bells ringing.

You can test if this is a spam comment by Googling a section of the comment, to see if it exists elsewhere. You’ll find that it does, and it has been posted on a great many websites, many of them SEO websites.

Searchenginejournal.com for example has published this very same comment on one of its blogs.

When managing your own blog, be very wary of spam comments such as this. They will harm the credibility of your blog and, at best, they’re duplicate content.

When engaging in link building tactics, do not under any circumstances paste the same comment on multiple websites such as this, or use any SEO services that do it for you.

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How to get your website banned by Google

Earlier this week we wrote the seven golden rules of SEO. These were rules that you should follow for a successful SEO campaign. What if you don’t want successful SEO though? What if you want to get your website banned by Google?

Why would you want to do this? It sure beats us, but yet many websites and SEO companies engage in practices that seem akin to walking up to Sergey Brin and Larry Paige and slapping them across the face while wearing a T-Shirt sporting your URL. It’s as if these websites and SEO ‘professionals’ wanted to be banned by Google.

So, as so many people clearly want a good banning, here are just five sure fire ways to get your website banned by Google.

1 – Hide text on your website

The old trick of hiding text on your website is a dead cert to get your website banned. Text can be hidden in a variety of different, sneaky ways. Black Hat SEO companies are always coming up with new ways to hide text on websites. Techniques include:

Making the text the same colour as the background
Hiding the text with divs and CSS
Positioning the text off the side of the screen with CSS
Hiding the text behind images

Each one of those techniques is Black Hat and will get you banned if your website faces a manual review.

2 – Buy cheap links from poor quality sources

Buying links is never a good idea as Google frowns upon it. However, buying low quality links from shady sources is a great way to get your website the old Spanish Archer from Google. If your SEO company buys hundreds of links on irrelevant Polish websites, (more…)

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s guide to SEO

Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, had seven glorious years on our TV screens battling the forces of darkness from demons to robots to gods, yet how would the Slayer and her Scooby gang cope with the arduous task of SEOing a website for Google? Buffy knows the way to a Vampire’s heart is through his chest with a sharpened stake (possibly Mr Pointy) but does she know how to achieve top rankings in Google for a competitive industry?

You bet she does. This guide will tell you just what the chosen one would do to SEO a website and how her Scooby gang would chip in with support.

Rupert Giles (Ripper)

Sadly, Giles has an inbuilt hatred of all things computer related so his input into any SEO campaign would have to be purely strategic. Luckily, Giles is an expert at strategy and research, which is essential for any SEO campaign. Giles would begin by researching your keywords (using his books of course, he refuses to touch an infernal computer) and determine which keywords would bring you the most traffic. Giles would also conduct extensive research into your competitors so that all of their (more…)

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How damaging can a Google penalty really be to your business?

Internet marketing, and SEO in particular, is a tricky business. There are many rules that you need to follow, and breaking those rules can carry dire consequences. For example, if you engage in black hat SEO practices (or hire an SEO company that does so) such as hiding text on your website, creating doorway pages, buying links, creating duplicate content, having multiple domains etc you can risk being caught out by Google and being shown the Google red card.

When Google shows you the red card, your website can suffer. What exactly can a Google penalty mean though and is it really that impactful on your website and your business as a whole?

When you consider that many websites (and yours really should be one of them) can receive as much as 90% of their traffic from search engines, imagine that traffic being taken away overnight. How much of a dent to your business would (more…)

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Dodgy websites showing as referrers in analytics

When you run your own website and you engage in Internet marketing activities such as SEO or PPC, it’s crucially important that you check your website’s statistics regularly to see where your traffic is coming from and whether you’re getting a good ROI (return on investment) from your Internet marketing.

Google Analytics is a good tool for this because it gives you detailed stats and it’s free to use.

If you do check your stats regularly, one part of your stats you should particular attention to is your referrers. This is a list of the websites, or rather specific pages on those sites, that have sent you traffic. You will receive traffic from websites when that site has linked to you. It could be an advert you’re paid for, a link that you have built, a natural link because they found your site interesting or perhaps you’re even being discussed on a blog or forum.

However, sometimes you’ll see sites like the ones below listed as (more…)