A UK SEO

www.warehouse-video.co.uk are another UK based company ranking in Google thanks to black hat techniques, this time using hidden text.

The site looks reputable on first look, nice design, clean, crisp and easy to use. They also are pulling in some natural traffic, e.g. number 1 for ‘dvd jewel case’ and 5 for ‘VHS Tape Packs’ but to do this the site uses a black hat technique of hiding a H1 tag at the top of most pages.

The coding is simple, a div at the top of the page called ‘top’.

<div id="top">
<h1>Wedding DVD Cases - Blank DVDs - DVD Jewel Case - VHS Tape Packs – Warehouse Video, Middlesex, UK</h1>
</div>

In the style sheet its hidden, not using the popular display none but using text-indent:-5000px. This is basically displaying the text 5000 pixels to the left of the screen.

#top h1
{
main.css
margin:0;
text-indent:-5000px;
}

If you want to see this hidden text there’s a couple of options, view the Google cache of the page, click on text only. The other way is to use the web developer toolbar plugin for Firefox and turn the css off, the text then appears.

The text appears on every page, with the text just changing depending on what the page is about. At the moment they seem have avoided any penalisation from Google most likely due to them being under the radar, not being a big enough site to get spotted. This will most likely not last, Google will catch up them which is way black hat methods of hiding text are not a sustainable way of getting rankings in Google.

There’s a little link at the bottom of www.warehouse-video.co.uk to www.castus.co.uk whom I’m guessing are responsible for the hidden text. As ever I’ll keep tabs of the site to see if they remove the text or drop out of the rankings.

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I’ve been in the SEO industry for around 2 years I still don’t fully understand what UK based company “I have a website now what” are doing. On the face of it they are a SEO company, that rank number 4-5 on “SEO”, so they know what they are doing. When you look into the website a little more they seem to have a strange way of doing SEO.

They place copies of clients sites on there own site. Links are placed at the bottom of their home page to these ‘mini sites’. (note index2.htm which is duplicate home page with different links)

Today the first link on there is sunglasses and links to an inner page called sunglasses.

<a href="sunglasses" target="_blank"><font color="#67859E">sunglasses </font></a>

The sunglasses inner page isn’t great when you get to it, it’s a splash page with a list of key phrases.

That links then to a site, all of this is located in the inner folder called /sunglasses/ but there are then some links out of the site to what I can only guess is the clients site – www.sunglasses-by-mail-order.co.uk.

So what are I have a website now what trying to do? Well they have plenty of links pointing at the home page of the site. The idea is the page rank flows from the domain to the inner pages. It’s similar to how reputation marketing works, set up a profile on a strong site, e.g. facebook and then get the ranking on the sub folder.

Is it working well, yes, search for ‘cheap cutlery’ and you’ll find one of these mini sites ranking at number 3 on Google.co.uk (the sunglasses one isn’t ranking yet so I’m guessing its new). So the client can then reap the benefits and maybe make some sales or enquirers from the incoming traffic but maybe after a bit of time on the site they 301 to the clients site to pass on the rankings and page rank.

This type of SEO isn’t black hat people can put what they want on their own site, it might be grey hat depending on you point of view. It might not yield the same results as a white hat campaign but seem to be working for I have a website now what.

I’ll be checking the site over next few month to see if http://www.ihaveawebsite-nowwhat.co.uk/sunglasses/ gets re-directed to the clients site!

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This is the first spam post. The idea is to clear up UK websites. I have nothing again the companies mentioned but they have websites that break the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

To start www.hammonds-uk.com from a company called Hammonds UK a bedroom and office furniture company. They’ve got a nifty little flash site which means pretty much no search engine traffic. But they’ve added some hidden text behind the flash in an attempt to bring in some search traffic.

So the text hidden behind the flash is.

<h1 class="hidden">Hammonds bedroom furniture and home office furniture</h1>
<h2 class="hidden">SALE NOW ON - Up to 20% off</h2>
<p class="hidden">Family Run Business Since 1926</p>
<p class="hidden">With 80 years experience and a 5 year guarantee you can buy with confidence! Your peace of mind is my peace of mind.</p>
<p class="hidden">Free Planning and Inspiring Design</p>
<p class="hidden">I've over 50 different bedroom and home office styles for you to choose from at the moment but I'm always looking to do something new.</p>

This is done using css setting the text as hidden.

hidden {
display: none;
}

In some instances hiding text behind flash is ok, providing the text hidden is exactly the same as the text in the flash file. If the text differs then your breaking the guidlines. If you are placing text behind a flash file, then hiding via CSS isn’t your best option, I would go with the noscript tag.

It doesn’t seem that the site is banned, it comes up for “Hammonds bedroom furniture” the hidden H1, but the hidden text method isn’t sustainable and Google will catch up on Hammonds UK.

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I’m a big fan of Gmail, I converted from Hotmail to Gmail about 6 months ago and have never looked back. This afternoon I saw a really misleading advert on Gmail. Your average Gmail advert will look something like this.

Anchor text for the link with a description.

This afternoon i saw an advert that used (1) Message as the anchor text for the link.

Obviously the anchor text of the link is there to entice the user to click the advert but putting that will just trick the user to the clicking the ad as it makes you think that you’ve got a new message. Pretty smart really of getting the click, but really an easy way to burn a lot of spend on the content network.

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