Risky SEO?

On Wednesday I had three wisdom teeth out. Slightly painful!

My dentist is Smile Solutions down here in Melbourne. They’re a fantastic dentist, and with the state of my bottom teeth I finally decided to get something done about them!

Smile Solutions recommended me to an excellent oral surgeon for the wisdom teeth extraction.

During my last check-up I was talking to my dentist about their website www.smilesolutions.com.au and casually asked if they were doing any SEO. Turns out an agency had been appointed to undertake some optimisation. Good on them.

So, of course, as soon as I got home I had a quick look.

This is what I saw:

Here’s what Google says in its webmaster guidelines:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, ‘Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?’.”

There’s another section in the webmaster guidelines which talks about “hidden text and hidden links”.

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?”

One thing Google doesn’t talk about in the guidelines (but I’m sure is aware of) is the issue of sneaky style sheets.

Let’s look at the Smile Solutions page again, this time with the style sheets turned off (so we can see exactly what Google sees). One way you can do this is by using Firefox and clicking on “view”, “page style” and “no style”.

That great big heading is styled as an <H1> tag, which (obviously) makes it appear as a heading (Google places importance on keywords in a heading), it’s just one of 200 signals used by Google’s algorithm to determine relevance for certain keywords. By the way, Google also looks at the position of headings and keywords on your pages, and the higher they are towards the top of the page, the more important they must be.

However, in Smile Solutions case, on the page we humans see, the developer has styled it to appear as tiny 8pt text with the colour almost the same as the background (but this is subjective; it’s my opinion).

Of course none of this optimisation was performed by Smile Solutions, but some might argue they’re responsible for this as they probably approved it.

What concerns me is Google.

I’m not saying that Google will ban the site, but if Google starts getting complaints from competitors and other webmasters, their web spam team may look at it and decide what to do. I’ve seen four courses of action Google usually takes:

1. Ignore it and decide it’s working within the guidelines.
2. Send an email to the webmaster of the site requesting a “please explain” or “modify your site or it will be banned”.
3. Impose a ranking penalty, usually resulting in a position loss of about 70 to 90 positions.
4. Simply remove it without warning (like it’s done on countless occasions – notably the recent ban of Germany’s BMW site).

Look, to be fair to the person who performed the Smile Solutions optimisation, the site is a full flash site which would have made it difficult to optimise off the bat.

To keep the best of both worlds, they have also created some static HTML pages which will assist, but I just don’t think you need to go to those kinds of lengths or take those sorts of risks to get a great search engine ranking.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.