SEO: Beware of the dark side

Search engine optimization offers benefits for those who understand its nuances and dangers for those who don't.

Computerworld - Being at the top of a search engine results page can mean the difference between business success and failure. So, what would you do to ensure a listing there?

Absolutely anything?
If so, you could be walking into a minefield.
Search engine optimization (known as SEO) involves actions intended to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. In the past 15 years, SEO has evolved into a complex art, one that is now the foundation of many businesses.
The problem is that there are ways of trying to improve your standing that are considered legitimate by the search engine companies like Google, but there are also methods that can get you into trouble. Google (which receives 90% of the world's search engine traffic, according to StatCounter, and 65.4% of the U.S. market, according to comScore) does not appreciate being gamed -- and will retaliate.
Just ask $17 billion retailer J.C. Penney, which got caught using black-hat (i.e., illegitimate) methods to boost its search results during the 2010 holiday shopping season. Penney was accused of taking part in a so-called link scheme, probably the most complicated black-hat SEO technique.
"Our high [search engine result] rankings were pushed down," Darcie Brossart, Penney's vice president of communications in Plano, Texas, confirmed concerning the sanctions Google imposed. "We have terminated our relationship with our former natural SEO firm. We don't know how it happened. We did not authorize it, and we were not involved."
It's important to recognize if your SEO firm (or your in-house Web expert) is venturing too close to the edge of the black-hat cliff -- because if Google or other search engines find there is some hanky-panky happening, it's your site that will suffer. "I'm not saying everyone is doing it, but it's not unusual," says Vanessa Fox, former Google Search employee and author of Marketing in the Age of Google. "A company might hire an SEO firm without knowing a lot about SEO, or they might think it's not risky," she adds. (Google publishes advice for those considering hiring SEO firms.)
A good grounding in what the major search engines do and don't consider acceptable can help companies avoid these issues. What follows are some of the techniques that are considered legitimate -- and not so legitimate -- and how you can tell the difference.
But first, let's take a quick look at how Google ranks sites.

Google's secret sauce

The foundation of Google's trademarked site-ranking technique, called PageRank, is links, explains spokesman Jake Hubert. PageRank is based on the number of outside Web pages that link to a page, the number of pages that link to those pages, and so on.
But while links remain a major consideration in PageRank ratings, Google's techniques have evolved since the search engine was launched in 1997. The company now ranks pages with an algorithm that has about 200 factors, Hubert says. These factors are adjusted on a daily basis; he says he counted about 500 changes in the past year.
Further details about the algorithm are not made public, Hubert says. A public version of an individual page's PageRank rating is displayed by Google Toolbar. However, those ratings sometimes need to be taken with a grain of salt, as we'll see later in the story.
At Bing, a Microsoft spokesman would only say that the site uses upwards of a thousand signals when deciding search results ranking, and that the nature and weight of the signals are constantly being adjusted. Meanwhile, Yahoo Search has announced that it will use the Bing search engine.
Because the algorithms remain a closely guarded secret, many white-hat SEO techniques focus on the known element -- links -- and are aimed at getting other sites with high PageRank ratings to link to lower-ranked sites.
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