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fooling the search engines - not recommended

The major search engines claim to be able to spot the more obvious tricks used to increase the frequency of appearance and the rankings of documents in search results. These include -

spoofing techniques

multiple occurrences of word in keywords META tag
multiple occurrences of words in COMMENTS and ALT text
multiple occurrences of words written in very small fonts
multiple occurrences of words written in the background colour
dynamic content changes (counters, dates etc) in duplicated documents
invisible links (using 1*1 pixel gif images)
invisible layers
text allocated to a non-visible area

page redirection

also called IP stealthing, page swopping etc
cloaking - page indexed by the search engine not the one seen by the user

misleading content

use of irrelevant terms in META tags (ie unrelated to page content)
using popular keywords in page contents as spam (eg trademarked terms)

dirty deeds

multiple submission of a competitor's page hoping it will be banned
registering of misspellings of major search engines to catch accidental traffic

such activities can be, and sometimes are, penalised by search engines - either by lowering the ranking of a submission, or by refusing to accept any further submissions from the offending domain


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comments to weed@wussu.com
revised 24 November 2005
URL http://www.wussu.com/search/crawler.htm