Apart from the fact if customers find out, it looks very bad in your design. Once again, Google is on the prowl and will punish you if they find out you’re doing such a thing. All it takes is one report, and then you won’t be so grateful you found a way to cut corners.
Directories are a great way to get your business noticed, but there are companies using them in the wrong way, giving multiple submissions in order to increase the amount of links they receive back to their own website.
But it appears there’s something more interesting happening here. Businesses are using Google Places as a way to fill in multiple submissions, using employees’ homes and other addresses to create different listing for the one company.
“They’re trying to prank the system,” says Monte Huebsch. “And they’re trying to get a whole bunch of reviews from different people.”
It’s spam. While it isn’t quite duplicated content, Huebsch points out if Google finally sees you listing multiple entries, it’ll do everything it can to make sure you only have the listings you deserve – which is just one.
This is very similar to buying links. Companies will decide they need to create a bunch of pages that only exist to link to their main page. These pages can consist of anything – articles that are related to something different entirely, or just blank pages with a few links here and there.
It’s pretty obvious what these are when you come across them. They’re not formatted very well, and they only exist to create links to a website. The more links that website has pointing towards it, the more Google thinks it’s something of value.
But it’s not just smaller websites that do this. Flight Centre New Zealand has a few dodgy sites linking towards it as well, with one page of a floor sanding company in Britain actually linking to the site:
Flight Centre was contacted for comment, but no reply was received before publication.
This is probably the most useless tool on this list. Now that Google has updated its algorithms with the Penguin and Panda updates, having links on irrelevant websites is pretty much a death sentence for your rankings.
And not only that – but Google is very aggressive when it comes to this sort of activity. IF it finds out you’ve been tinkering with the links moving to your page, then you’d better be prepared to work your way up from the bottom.
“It’s so important not to use these now,” says Chris Thomas. “Your backlink profile has to be as natural as possible.”
Sometimes businesses will just fill their sites with useless pages filled with articles. Except these articles aren’t really articles in the sense they’re providing useful information, or some type of advice. These articles will exist solely for the purpose of increasing Google rankings.
The way these sites do this is by stuffing keywords into the middle of these articles, seemingly at random.
Just as Daniel Bailey pointed out earlier in this article, Google doesn’t value links as much anymore. While it still puts a large amount of emphasis on them, what it really wants to see is relevant content. And when it starts seeing keywords placed in these seemingly relevant articles, it starts to wonder whether your site is really as relevant as it seems.
This one is more common than you’d think, and if you operate any type of blog or website that allows comments then you’ll recognise it immediately.
Companies set up automated comment systems that trawl the internet, looking for blogs to comment on. They usually say something strange like “great blog, keep it up” and include a link to an unrelated website.
There are two reasons. The first is that it’s completely tacky. You don’t want your business associated with such spam, and as soon as people see your link or business name next to a comment spam, they’ll associate your business with that forever.
The second reason is because Google will find out and hit you for it. It’ll start associating you with spam, and then start scoring your links lower and lower. It’ll value you less.
But on the other hand, Daniel Bailey of Switched On Media says a good commenting policy can do wonders. It’s the spammers who get lazy and start thinking they can get the benefit without doing the work.
“If you find a blog and have something decent to say about a blog post, that will help you with SEO.”
“It’s just another example of people who have looked at a good and legitimate technique for getting good SEO rankings, and then start abusing it.”
