SEO Gone Wild in Texas – UPDATED below
Such is the situation in the race for the Texas governor’s office. But, what is the website for the campaign for Texas governor doing that is causing the uproar and that help us in our own efforts to get higher search ranking on Google? It is more than keywords, it is auto-generated keyword stuffing cloaked text content. Sometimes the best learning examples are what not to do.
This has been extensively covered in the press, most notably by the Austin Statesman. But it is not just adding keywords, like you might think of the keywords meta tag. What the website seems to be doing is taking search phrase keywords and adding then into a hidden layer of text content that you can’t easily see but search engines can.
This is considered black-hat SEO, it is unethical and in violation of Google’s webmaster’s guidelines and can get a website banned from Google’s index. Here are the specific problematic issues and SEO practice with the website that are contrary to Google’s specific guidelines (linked to guidelines); Hidden text and links, Cloaking, and Keyword stuffing
And not only are the SEO techniques used in violation of Google’s guidelines they also seem to be in violation of the website’s reported creators Election Mall Technologies own ethical standards.
It is important to realize that this website is the product of web professionals that know better and should have better ethical practice than to lead their client into this PR “nightmare” situation.
Here is a snippet of what the website presents to search engines that you cannot see, because of the “display:none” command to your web browser. The cloaked website text has hundreds of lines like these below -
<body onLoad=”showimg();”>
<div id=”Layer1″ style=”display:none;”>rick perry yell leader
www celebratingtexas
celebratingtexas
texans protecting our water environment and resources
cooper tire texarkana
texans for life coalition
bruchard nodes
ama on tort reform
carol strayhorn
strayhorn comptroller
rick perry campaign contributions
carole strayhorn
cjd texas
texans radio online
texas payroll tax rates
rick perry governor of texas
UPDATE
It seems that Google has de-listed the standbykay.com site from their index. SEO FAIL! Lesson on how not to optimize a site or operate an internet presence.
Still waiting for a comment from the reported site vendor, Election Mall Technologies, as to whether or not this is a feature of their website services. They did return my call but said it is taking time to answer because their “CEO is traveling internationally”.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] In some cases even getting the site they created kicked off Google. As a follow up to my post SEO Gone Wild, this report by ABC News not only shares the outcome of that site, but also Google’s actions [...]