Scamming

When a search engine suspects a website of scamming it may be penalised, or even banned. Basically scamming falls into two parts:

• Scamming to try and pass your website off as something it is not so it appears higher in a particular search
• Scamming to try and fool the search engines by using a keyword or phrase over and over again so they think your website it the most important for that word

Ultimately scamming is treated so seriously that you could have your entire website blocked from search results and have to start over.

Trying to pass your website off as something it is not

If your website is about selling a book 'How to be successful' but your meta tags and title contain words like "Princess Diana" or "Free money" then alarm bells are going to start ringing with the search engines. Titles and meta tags that don't match the content are, to them, a sure sign of scamming.

In the same vein placing misleading keywords in the alt tags of your images or in text that is the same color as the background, so only search engines see it, will also land you in hot water.

Part of SEO is to match your content to your tags so your pages appear in the right search results.

Over use of a keyword (keyword density)

A search engine will look at the contents of a website to try and ascertain what it is about. If it sees the word 'sausages' appear to a density of between 2 and 6% it will conclude that this page is about sausages and people searching for sausages should find it.

This will be reinforced if the word sausages is also found in the title and the meta tags.

But once you go over 6% (some people say 4%) the robot is going to start suspecting you are scamming - you are trying to fool them into thinking this is the most important page ever about sausages because it gets mentioned so many times. But a search engine robot won't conclude this, instead it may discount the entire page, perhaps the website.

The most common offender for scamming is overuse of the alt tag with an image. This isn't seen by users unless they have the graphics turned off on their browser so some website builders treat it as the ideal place to cram in keywords. They'll create a tag like <img src="sausage.jpg" alt="sausage picture, sausages, picture of sausages"> and so on.

That's of no benefit to users and a recipe for being penalised by the search engines for scamming. Keywords should be well spaced throughout the page and the website, not placed close together - as with this site where "SEO" is mentioned a great deal but not in rapid succession.

Part of SEO is about making sure the keywords and phrases are used in balanced proportion to the page contents and used enough for search engines to treat them as keywords and phrases.

When over using a keyword is not scamming

Sometimes there really is no way to reduce the keyword density. A website that sells roses, for example, might mention the word 'rose' far too much and end up being treated with scamming suspicion.

But remember search engines also watch user behaviour. If users - on a regular basis - go to the rose website, stay on it, click around, add it to their favourites or even create a link from their website to it then the search engine has to conclude, "OK, I thought this website was scamming but user behaviour says it is above board - so no penalty here."

A final word on keyword density

Many tools on the internet offering to check your keyword density do just that. They strip out the code and look for repetitions. These are then divided by the total number of words to tell you that, for example, "Banana" makes up 3% of your text.

And if bananas is what you are about all well and good but it is also important where that 3% is. It should be in the heading tags, title tags and meta tags as well as within the text. If it only appears in the text it may be there often but it won't be weighted as strongly as if it were in the tags.

Alternatively if it only appears in the tags it can be seen with suspicion so mix well. "Why is 'banana' in the tags if it isn't in the text?" is the question a search engine will ask. Any good SEO process should resolve this.

Copying

There are many websites that are solely made up of other people's content. This is often carried out in a totally legally fashion by taking RSS feeds from someone else and placing the data on their own website.

The motivation for copying is that the content is free and there is lots of it available which means making a text rich website with little effort is easy.

Absolutely nothing wrong with this but as search engines get faster and faster they also get better and better and finding the original source first and discounting those who copying it. This means they will display the orginal first and the website that is copying .... well probably not at all as it adds no value to the search. SEO will not be able to help a website like this.

This is illustrated in our example of The tale of the news site.

Copying that works for SEO

There are however two ways in which copying does not affect, and may even raise, your rankings:

• You are copying small amounts of text and placing them within original and unique content in the same way that one book might quote another. But the original content makes up the majority of the text.
• You mix and match which we'll discuss now

Mix and match is just a way of explaining that you don't just take RSS feeds wholesale and dump them on your page. Using code you may mix several RSS feeds together to give, for example, "Reviews of Uncle Jack's Orange Juice" which contains reviews taken from several other websites.

Now you are copying but you are also creating genuinely useful information as you are providing original content by bringing a number of pieces of data together - but not in the same pattern as everyone else. This makes it unique and SEO can help promote it.

Matching is a similar method where you create code, or manually intervene, to make sure the feeds are relevant to your readers. Let's say you own a website selling outboard motors for boats and you get a number of RSS feeds from different publications but you only display those that contain the word "outboard motor".

You are copying 'outboard motor' stories from websites or publications like Yacht Weekly and Go Sailing Monthly but only selected stories with a particular theme. Now as long as there are not too many people doing the same type of copying the search engines will conclude this 'filtered' copying is probably useful to someone. In this case SEO can improve the rankings of such pages.

The you may go further to remove certain stories that won't be of help to your users such as the story "Man killed by outboard motor"(!). Your 'Outboard motor news' page is copying but the search engines will recognise it is not a pure RSS dump and give you credit for it. And so will your visitors.

Copying isn't as evil as some paint it so long as it is done with care and, of course, so long as you always give the originator credit. SEO is about making sure this is so.

Scamming and copying summary

Many websites are scamming but they don't even realise it. Some contain extremely useful information but they are being penalised.

Copying is more straightforward and those who do it, know they are!

But there is no reason that your website should be penalised in the search engine results for scamming or copying with care and part of the SEO process is to make sure that it isn't.