Deciding whether to trick

Deciding whether to trick

by SERDAR AKTAS

Should you use the tricks in this chapter, and if not, why not? You’ll hear several reasons for not using tricks. The first I’m not going to belabor, because I’m not sure the argument behind this reason is very strong: ethics. You’ll hear from many people that the tricks in this chapter are unethical, that those who use them are cheating and one step on the evolutionary ladder above pond scum (or one step below pond scum, depending on the commentator). Self-righteousness is in ample supply on the Internet. Maybe these people are right, maybe not. I do know that many people who try such tricks also have great reasons for doing so and are not the Internet’s equivalent of Pol Pot or Attila the Hun. They’re simply trying to put their best foot forward in a difficult technical environment. Many people have tried search engine tricks because they’ve invested a lot of money in Web sites that turn out to be invisible to the search engines. These folks can’t afford to abandon their sites and start again. (See Chapter 7 for a discussion of why search engines sometimes can’t read Web pages.) You can, rightly so, point out that these folks can deal with the problem in other ways, but that just means the people involved are misinformed, not evil. The argument made by these tricksters might go something like this: Who gave the search engines the right to set the rules, anyway? One could argue that doing pretty much anything beyond the basics is cheating. After all, smart Webmasters armed with a little knowledge can make the sorts of adjustments discussed elsewhere in this book, pushing their Web sites up in the ranks above sites that are more appropriate for a particular keyword phrase yet are owned by folks with less knowledge. Ethics aside, the really good reason for avoiding egregious trickery is that it may have the opposite effect and harm your search engine position. And a corollary to that reason is that other, legitimate ways exist to get a good search engine ranking. (Unfortunately, these are often more complicated and time-consuming.)
author site: www.more-tech.com