Proper SEO -v- Gaming the spiders

henbane

I'm curious as to which techniques fall where. Obviously, having great content and getting legitimate links from popular sites falls under proper SEO but we've all tried to game the systen to improve rankings in other ways. What do you do that you regard as proper SEO and what have you done/could you do that you reckon is just gaming the spiders?

cfitz

I would regard all the things that I do as proper SEO. Some things, such as 301 redirects to prevent duplication issues for example, are things that you might consider a waste of time if it wasn't for the workings of the search engine spiders. But most of these things are tiny steps towards a better structured (and searchable) world wide web.

Laslo

Build your sites with humans in mind and forget about SE's maybe? Just a thought.

cfitz

Well you would need to take into account that most humans use Google

Trojan

By "gaming the spiders" the first thing that springs to mind is cloaking - that is a black hat method where content shown to spiders is not what's shown to users' browser.

Telling which is the spider is tricky. It's done on a fairly amateur level by using the UserAgent identifier string, or more a bit more advanced by IP address blocks.

Doorway pages are very similar to cloaking - they actually present the same data to both spider and users, but in the case of users arriving on page, they have an instant redirect to a more friendly page (using e.g. javascript, meta refresh, etc).

Doorway pages and javascript redirect is what was done on bmw.de in the infamous example where they got caught and delisted tfor several months in early 2006.

I do not recommend you use either of these on sites that you care about. LogOn.ie do not do it for our own site nor have we or will we for any of our clients!

References: bmw.de call edout by Matt Cutts

Laslo

cfitz wrote: »

Well you would need to take into account that most humans use Google

Not when you're building the user experience. SEO that's built with Google in mind that doesn't interfere with the user experience, cause any confusion, etc. is fine. SEO that does interfere with the user experience or any black hat SEO is cowboy bulls**t.

Qs

Laslo wrote: »

Not when you're building the user experience. SEO that's built with Google in mind that doesn't interfere with the user experience, cause any confusion, etc. is fine. SEO that does interfere with the user experience or any black hat SEO is cowboy bulls**t.

Blackhat techniques are dodgy mainly because theres eventually a fix found by the SEs and once they have it you run the risk of being penalised.

The idea of having a site made purely for the user is a lovely ideal but in the real world web sites have to be marketed and if there are 50 other websites out there all optimising themselves to the hilt and buying links your going to have a very hard time getting alot of people onto your site sitting on page 6 of the SERPs.

You have to find a balance between the 2, if it was all about SEO without any regard for users it'd be easy. Its finding a balance where you've a great user friendly site full of quality content and you are able to promote your site on the SEs that takes work.