OBSTACLES TO SEO

Illegal SEO

Illegal SEO or Black Hat SEO practices are punishable with permanent search engine blacklisting so it not even worth venturing down the cowboy SEO route. Such practices include:

Link Farms/Spamdexing

A network of websites interlinking with each other, for the purposes of achieving high page ranking.

Doorway Pages/Cloaking

Presenting a different content to the search engine’s spider to that presented to the user’s browser, again for the purpose of achieving high page ranking.

Keyword Stuffing

Stuffing the page both in the copy and meta tags with keywords and phrases to maximise ranking. The words are then hidden by making them the same colour as the background, rendering them invisible to the human eye.

Scraper Pages

Filling a website with content that has been copied from other sites, rendering it unoriginal and essentially an act of plagiarism.

Further Obstacles to SEO Optimisation

Embedded JavaScript Navigation

Search engines prefer external Javascript files to embedded script, which spiders cannot follow.

Frames

Pages designed using frames (sometimes called iframes) cannot be indexed effectively by a search engine spider.

Tables

Inappropriate use of tables for design, rather than the use of cascading style sheets (CSS), which use complicated HTML code, thus rendering it more difficult for the spider to crawl. Tables should only be used to display tabular data.

Flash

Overuse can trip up a spider because a search engine cannot read Flash or Shockwave content.

Splash Pages

Although they seem like a good idea, they bury the content of the site one level deeper, making it harder for the spider to find the top level pages for indexing.

Complex URLs

Essentially a spider will not bother to follow a complicated link – http://www.url.com/page.php?id=58fnh3User=%Tim%

Pages Buried More than Three Clicks/Links from the Index Page

Spiders often ignore pages deeper than three levels down.

Broken Links

Not only are linked-to pages never found, it is believed that some search engines degrade rankings of sites and pages with broken links.

The moral of the tale ...

Call Ardent Search Engine Optimisation Specialists in Surrey today on 01483 267 915 for a chat with one of our SEO advisers and discover how quickly the search can be over for your business.

See our Contact Us page for further information.