Even big companies (still) try and cheat at SEO

As the SEO industry matures and many companies are feeling the benefit of great search marketing or digital marketing campaigns, companies big and small are willing to take risks to get top positions. As experts in SEO, we've heard all of the questions from our clients about how to get to the top, no matter what the cost.

Our answer is always clear; don't try and cheat the search engines.

If you read the SEO forums regularly, you'll know the so called 'black hat' techniques used by shady SEO companies are hugely frowned on and should never be practised.

The more common black hat techniques which are used include using hidden text on pages which contain dozens/hundreds of links, using dodgy redirects to try to fool search engines and creating copy which is too keyphrase heavy. This is just the tip of the iceberg as many more bad practises are carried out, some which are very obvious, some less so.

Despite search engines like Google publishing their guidelines on SEO, credible websites like SEOMoz publishing their ranking factors and dozens of forums giving advice on best practise, many companies, both BIG and small, still ignore this advice and try and cheat the search engines.

We've found some clear examples while searching around recently of websites who are using unethical practises to try to get better rankings. Perhaps they should have spoken to a credible SEO company first?

Netbanx
Bad use of pale text on a white background containing keyword & keyphrase rich text and links out of context with the rest of the website. This runs the risk of being seen as being sneaky. Note, this is one we found recently, hopefully they fix it.




BMW
Ok, this is old but this screenshot (from Blogscoped) shows how the site did look a few years back. Note the repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive text on the page.


Car insurance website
This website shows you how to not create landing pages. The overuse of poor content on this page would most probably be seen as spammy and wouldn't get any brownie points with Google. Users wouldn't like it either.

88db
We've saved the best to last on this one. This page shows a dizzying amount of keyword repetition as well as trying to baffle the user by splashing numerous colours across the page. One of the worst examples of keyword stuffing we've seen in a long time.


These are just some examples of how not to do SEO. We never recommend practices such as those shown above to anyone because it doesn't do any good and it certainly doesn't doesn't help us.

If you think that your website is running the line between good and/or bad, let us know and we'll be happy to review it.