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SEO and keyword stuffing


virtual

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A client of mine just sent me a Word document with apparently nothing in it. In fact it is filled with hidden keywords which have been reduced in size so as to appear invisible. He said a friend of his had put this on his site and shot to the top of the first page in Google, and of course he asked me to copy and paste the text onto his site.

 

I replied that I would advise against doing this as he could get banned by Google. Have any of you come across this and would you advise against it?

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this is known as cloaking and been known for ages by the landingpages community to quickly get on top positions in searches and save money on not buying adsense spots.

 

However cloaking is part of what we reffer to as blackhat SEO, and you will be strongly punished when revealed by google to mention one. In short your site will either suffer from a ban or it will be put back a bunch of pages, which to be honest is like a ban.

 

That technique was left out by us doing landing pages a long time ago after google started going down hard on sites using blackhat SEO, so I would give you the advice of not doing it. As you are cheating by filling the site with keywords you wanna rank good on without matching it with quality content. And will be seen at with anger by others and if not google themselves someone else will rat you out for ranking so high by cloaking keywords.

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@Eric, no the client hasn't put anything on the site, he asked me to do it and I told him he would get banned by Google but if he absolutely insisted I would do it but would not take responsability for any consequences. However he needs more of an explanation about the why's and wherefore's and risks.

 

Thanks for the input krillz. The client will do what I tell him, but I needed a better explanation of SEO and what he risks than the little I know about the subject. He tells me that a number of "friends" are doing it and getting away with it. Personally I would not take that risk and will advise against once again.

Edited by virtual
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Well apparently from what I am told some of them have been doing it for years without negative impact. That surprises me, but what do I know??? Google are far from stupid.

 

The "friend" was the one who provided the Word document with the hidden text, originally the file was .pages so I requested .doc or pdf and the "friend" who is a steam cleaner supplied the Word file as the pdf does not work....??? The font colour is black, the size is 1 px, I can't offhand remember the font itself but it was something I am not familiar with. It is invisible to the naked eye but if you do Com/Ctrl + A it highlights then just increasing the text size makes it visible.

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You might want to look at this article http://www.bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/banned-by-google.php and perhaps send this link to your client: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353.

 

I haven't personally had to deal with a situation like this, but I agree with everyone else's comments. It is considered black hat SEO and can get you banned from google search results. Just because you haven't been caught yet doesn't mean you won't get caught.

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@Stefan

You've seen banned for life or the same type of hidden keywords?

 

Shoot I got the dreaded 180 second thing again.....and again.....I'll go and make a cup of tea and forget I even wrote this :rolleyes:

 

I've never had that problem. I know a guy who once had a very profitably web based business and he got shut down for black-hat SEO and subsequently went BK. Don't mess with Google!

 

You're still having the 180s delay? That is weird, you should be well past that.

 

Stefan

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