Money Tree Marketing

This is an old article from Matt Cutts blog on hidden text and displaying different content to visitors than what gets showed to the search engines.  This was specifically mentioned in the previous article I blogged about so I wanted to include this as well.  Make sure you check out the article on another high profile, big company black hat SEO debacle.

That’s a violation of our webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of “Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users.”

It appears that at least some of the JavaScript-redirecting pages have already been removed from bmw.de, which is very encouraging, but given the number of pages that were doing JavaScript redirects, I expect that Google’s webspam team will need a reinclusion request with details on who created the doorway pages. We’ll probably also need some assurances that such pages won’t reappear on the sites before the domains can be reincluded. I’m leaving comments turned off on this post; there are no doubt plenty of other search engine optimization areas to discuss this.

Ramping up on international webspam

Technorati Tags: black hat seo, bmw, matt cutts

Retail giant JC Penny dominated the search engines during the last holiday shopping season.  They had #1 rankings for virtually any term you can think of and had to have made an absolute killing as people shopped on the internet for Christmas gifts.  You would hope a big company would have done this by hiring a reputable search engine marketing company who worked tirelessly to add value to the internet and as a by product of their hard work, they improved their search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it turns out that they pretty much cheated.  They hired a company that used practices that are not what Google wants.  Since big brother Google didn’t like it, action has been taken, JC Penny’s search engine rankings have plummeted, and the search engine marketing company in question has been fired.

The article is way too long for me to cover here, so check out the excerpt below than go to the article and read the whole story.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets – NYTimes.com

Technorati Tags: black hat seo, google, jc penny

The world is changing. Heck it is always changing. What I am here to talk about specifically is the internet and the way we use it to interact with our friends, buy things, do business, learn new things, and generally intertwine it into the way we live our lives.

My purpose here is to provide you with the latest developments in the world of the internet. Over time, this should be a fantastic resource to find almost anything you could want to know. Some of the content will be written by us here at MoneyTreeMarketing.com and some of it will be article excerpts and links to articles written by other people. In all cases, it will be relevant, hand picked content. There won’t be any automatic dumping of meaningless articles scraped from blogs and article sharing sites. We may review some good articles from reputable sites like EzineArticles, but we will review every article before it gets posted.

If you want to contact us and suggest content, just let us know. You can either leave a comment or use the contact us form.

I hope you enjoy your visit and keep coming back. Make sure you click the “like” button if you find an article helpful. If you want stay on top of everything we do, make sure to become a fan of our Facebook page. Thanks again for visiting us today!