How Search Works
By Peter Boyd on March 2, 2013 in SEO
Google recently posted an awesome animated info-graphic on how search works. Take a look and learn about search.
Not only does Google showcase how crawling, indexing, algorithms work in general, but it showcases how it fights spam. Google showcases live results of pages that are removed for pure spam reasons.
Take a look a the live spam results. I think you will notice that every pure spam website was a very, very poor design. Most had little to no CSS formatting, default fonts, poor images and little formatting. Out of the 47 screenshots that I saw, not a single one would be a website that I would trust and/or buy something from, and that is just based on a 1-second small thumbnail graphic. I did not even read the text and could “feel” that the site seemed spammy.
Other categories of web spam include the following. You can read details about web spam here.
- Pure spam – live sc
- Legacy
- Hacked site
- Unnatural links from your site
- Automatically generated content and infinite spaces
- Cloaking and/or sneaky redirects
- Thin content with little or no added value
- Unnatural links to your site
- Parked domains
- User-generated spam
- Hidden text, Copying Text and/or keyword stuffing
- Spammy free hosts and dynamic DNS providers
I think most law firm websites do not spam. However, I have encountered these areas as problematic in conducting site reviews for potential clients:
- Getting hacked. Every site can get hacked. It sucks, but can be overcome in 24 to 48 hours if you can determine where the hack came from and remove.
- Keeping back links and inbound links squeaky clean. If you buy links, you may eventually get a Google notice informing you have a nefarious back link profile that you have to clean up.
- Making sure their pages have enough content. Make sure you do not have any one paragraph pages about your practice area.
- No Copying Text! Unfortunately, I have seen copied text from other websites too many times.
If you have a few minutes, take a look How Search Works and learn about web spam.
