The Folly of Fooling Google

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For as long as search engines have crawled the Web, site owners have engineered tricks to get the best possible position on search results pages. Traditionally, these tricks include the following:

• Cloaking, in which important, crawl-attracting keywords are hidden from the view of site visitors but remain visible to spiders

• Keyword loading, related to cloaking, in which topical words are loaded into the page’s code, especially in page titles and text headers

• Link loading, through which large numbers of incoming links are fabricated

Spider manipulating tricks have worked to some extent in the past thanks to the automated nature of search crawling. Google is highly automated, too, but more sophisticated than most other spiders. And as a company policy, Webmaster chicanery is dealt with harshly. Obviously, you’re not breaking any laws by coding your pages in a certain way, even if your motive is to fool Google. But Google doesn’t hesitate to banish a site from the index entirely if it determines that its PageRank is being artificially jiggered. No published policy states when or if a banished site is reinstated. Google is serious about the integrity of PageRank.

Tip 

The best rule of thumb is this: Create a site for people, not for spiders. Generally, the interests of people and Google’s spider coincide. A coherent, organized site that’s a pleasure to surf is also a site that’s easy to crawl. Keeping your priorities aligned with your visitors is the best way to keep your PageRank as high as it can get.

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