I'm not even going to get into tables as that opens a whole other can of worms. If your site is table-based (your designer or SEO will be able to tell you this if you don't know) there are some basic practices to insure that the code these tables add is minimized. Unfortunately I can't get into the myriad of different situations this can entail and will have to save it for a future article (so be sure to bookmark our SEO blog to keep up-to-date on that and other developments in the industry). Fourth, you could avoid the bully. This is not the same thing as ignoring him. You simply make sure you aren’t where he is. In terms of SEO, you start targeting keywords and phrases that the black hat isn’t using. By using this approach, you can narrowly target your audience and start picking up traffic from “long tail” searches. You can also work on making your site more inviting to visitors, so when you do get that traffic they’re more likely to convert. Bad internal links. You want your internal pages to rank. Most sites will generally target the highest priority phrases on the homepage of the site but the internal pages are the ones that will rank for specific products, services and long tail phrases. To maximize the rankability of the internal pages you need them to be easily found by the spiders and you need to associate these pages with the keywords you're targeting. In short, you need to link to them with text and you need that text to include the keywords. This isn't some deep, dark mystery of SEO and has been well documented and commented on but we've seen tons of instances where internal links are image only or worse, an unspiderable script-based navigation system. Third, you could report the offender to Google. Unfortunately, like the adult aides monitoring recess in the schoolyard, Google can only act on behavior it actually sees. As Aull notes, “there’s no guarantee they’ll do anything about the miscreants quickly – or ever, for that matter.” It could also encourage a black hat SEO to start using even sneakier techniques. If your designer is using image or script-based navigation for aesthetic reasons that's fine. In fact, it'll likely leave you with a more appealing site visually however you need to make sure your key pages are linked to in the content of you homepage or from text in the footer to insure they get found and spidered quickly and easily.You can certainly get away with something shorter and with fewer key words (remember, ideally, that you should use only one key phrase per page). You might want to use the “View Source” command on a variety of web sites, especially those that score high in the SERPs, if you need to get a better idea of how the META key words and META description tags are used. Second, you could take up negative SEO yourself, fighting fire with fire. That might be satisfying for a while, but your success will ring hollow after both sites are banned from the SERPs. Like a high school principal, Google isn’t going to care who started it. Over-optimized pages. I love seeing websites that were developed by a web designer who “knows SEO” and has stuffed so many keywords and header tags into the pages that it reads more like an eye chart than sales copy. I can't list all the abuses that exist out there but here's a quick sample of what your page shouldn't read like (and I'll use digital cameras as the example again): Digital Cameras Digital cameras are very useful. When you need digital cameras to take digital pictures you'll want to look for our cameras first. Our digital cameras are the best digital cameras you can buy online. So when you want to buy digital cameras online be sure to visit our store and buy digital cameras online from us at the lowest prices. Defending Against Black Hat and Negative SEO Tactics - Dealing with Black Hat and Negative SEO So what do you do if a black hat SEO is directly or indirectly attacking your site’s position in the SERPs? Diane Aull came up with five possible approaches, based on how one would deal with a schoolyard bully. There is no telling which approach – if any – would be successful. Her suggestions would probably work best when dealing with someone who is not targeting your site with negative SEO, but rather engaging in black hat SEO to increase his or her own site’s ranking in the SERPs, thus driving yours down. Can you see what's wrong there? Well so can the search engines. Your pages should read like your writing for a visitor and not a search engine. Yes you need to make sure your keywords get in there (which should be easy since that's what the searchers is looking for information on) but you're not looking to cram them in with a density of 30%. If you can get a density of around 3% and kept the content easily read by your human visitors then you've done well. So Rooy’s company simply saw to it that emails were sent to all the webmasters, telling them not to take the email from the scammer seriously. He observed that “a large number of links have fortunately been replaced. Despite this, it remains an annoying problem.” I mentioned that I couldn't possibly list all the horrendous issues we've encountered from designers in the past but I also promised to list some other resources you can visit for additional information. Here they are: * Great article by Sheri Thurow on the Clickz site titled, “Top Five SEO Design Mistakes * A top 10 list on the Webconfs site, “Top 10 SEO Mistakes * Another top 10 list – this time by Eric Enge on the directory Watch site titled, “The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes If you see your web designer doing one or all of these then know in advance, you or your SEO is going to have some major hurdles to jump through. Rooy summed up the attack as finding out who is linked to a well-ranking rival site, sending them threatening email and waiting for the response. This particular scammer also sent a follow-up email if the link was not removed quickly enough. So what did Rooy do? First, he tracked down the scammer but chose not to force their host to close their account – it was located in Tajkistan, no WHOIS information was provided, and “the scammer can just as easily create another address and continue his work, against whichever website he chooses.”
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