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Diagnosing Potential SEO Problems - Without Guilt
November 30, 2005
From a psychological perspective, it turns out that asking a new or potential client, "Have you ever engaged in any spammy or controversial SEO activity?" is quite a loaded question - somewhere between "Have you stopped beating your spouse?" and "Are you really going to wear that tonight?"
While we ask this question for diagnostic reasons only, it elicits immediate defense from most marketing managers. "No - of course not!" they interject, before we can even finish the question.
Too bad. I actually enjoy unthreading the spaghetti-like mess that some clients bring to us. I have fun looking at things like doorway pages, scripts that create cloaked pages, and complex link networks to see exactly how they're sculpted, and to compare the intended result of the technique versus the actual results attained. What I don't enjoy is finding out about these techniques six months into a campaign.
So recently, I recognized the error of our ways when we discovered a client, who had previously promised that all was on the level, had several additional domains, all on the same IP block, using a meta refresh to point to the main site. This was the likely cause of rejection from a few human-edited directories.
So why was it our error? To the client, it was on the level. Long ago, they had purchased domains that they either intended on using, or that they didn't want their competition to buy, and they simply pointed them to the main domain the only way they knew how. Fast-forward to the last few years, when the specific technique you use in redirection is a critical component of SEO strategy.
So now I phrase it differently. "Tell me about your site's history," I say. "What have you done in the past, and how did it work?" It's a little bit clinical and sterile, but we end up finding out much more helpful information.
As a post-script, to phrase it in terms free of the slightest hint of judgment, here are some site activities that, while we're sure they were done with ONLY THE BEST OF INTENTIONS, might cause you some eventual grief in the indexing and ranking processes:
- Exchanging links with a site or group of sites whose sole criterion for offering a link is verifying your willingness to offer a link in return.
- 5000 (or any-thousand) doorway pages with 75% keyword density that redirect to your normal site.
- Any activity whose description was punctuated with, "Don't worry, no human will ever see this anyway."
(Humans, we keep finding, are one of the most annoying factors in web usability.)
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at November 30, 2005 02:14 PM
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