digital blog

I have written a new article which I will shortly be putting out on the web which you can read here first -

The 7 Deadly Sins Guaranteed to Get Your Website Banned!
By Dan Foley


Brothers and sisters I have sinned! I have been a sinner! I didn’t know I was sinning but the great Search Engine Spirits didn’t care. Don’t let this happen to you!

In reality, I didn’t commit all Seven of the Deadly Sins, but you don’t need to commit more than one to get banned.

The First Deadly Sin – Don’t Hide Text

When I first started one of my websites, I used a template from a large template company. There was nothing wrong with it. I just didn’t have everything in place to put into some of the Read More >> links and I didn’t have links for some of the menu buttons but knew that eventually I would use.

What I did was change the text to the same color as the background. I figured I would save myself time in the future by having the links available and keep the same page formatting by doing this. In reality, I didn’t have any “keywords” there and in no way was trying to stuff the pages with keywords.

The Search Engine Spirits are pretty smart. I think there is a lot of artificial intelligence there, but the search engines are also programmed to look for hidden text because of some of the tricks that “Black Hat” SEO companies have used in the past.

I wasn’t getting any visitors and I wondered why. I also wasn’t using any SEO tools so I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on until one day I happened to visit Google’s site and started reading the section on Google information for Webmasters where they said “Avoid hidden text or hidden links.” I went “Hoh Boy!” Needless to say I started learning about search engine optimization (SEO). (As a side bar, since that time I have made SEO a kind of avocation and now make SEO tools available for everyone at another site I have http://www.digitalpagesinc.com/search_engine_optimization.html .)

I went back and got rid of any hidden text and now am visited regularly by the search engines.

The Second Deadly Sin - Don’t Have Links to Nowhere or Employ Cloaking or Sneaky Redirects

As a result of my having “holding areas” on my website so that I could fill in the blanks later, I had links to nowhere which meant that the search engines where going to become confused and probably not index the pages. While that probably wasn’t a Deadly Sin, some of the Black Hats try to fake out the search engines by setting up link structures where they show the search engines one thing and visitors something else. This is part a ranking strategy that may get the pages high rankings for a little while, but it eventually gets found out and then the site goes to search engine Hades.

Along with this go redirects which are set up to send competitors or search engines to another page or worse, sending a visitor to a site they never intended to visit. Have you ever gotten into a page trap? You know what I mean then. There used to be a site called Whitehouse.com which was a bad site and you couldn’t get out of it. If you closed your page another one would pop up. The correct address for the Whitehouse is Whitehouse.gov. Lots of people made that mistake including me.

The Third Deadly Sin - Don’t Have Duplicate Content on Your Website

This is a tricky one because it depends on how much duplicate content you have. You can have a few phrases here and there that are the same and you can have duplicate content as other sites. If you couldn’t, news sites couldn’t exist. Copyright law is another issue altogether.

What the search engines are looking out for is multiple pages or multiple domains or multiple subdomains with essentially duplicate content. These pages or domains are set up to try to optimize on keywords in a lazy manner. If you do this you are going to get banned.

The Fourth Deadly Sin – Don’t Spam Keywords

This is one of the mistakes that new site owners make when doing DYI search engine optimization. They know from reading various publications that keywords are extremely important to getting placed by search engines. They then try to stuff their keywords into their web page as many times as they can.

Additionally, before the search engines became more sophisticated, the SEOs used to put in keywords over and over again to get the attention of search engines and fake them out as to the importance of the page.

In order to overcome this, search engines changed their algorithms to look for too many keywords in places they didn’t seem to belong and identified them as spam. The search engines then began to reduce the importance of or ban the pages.

There is a rule of thumb that when putting keyword into your keyword meta tags; don’t repeat them more than three times. I’ve seen sites with keywords repeated in their keyword meta tags several times without penalty. Its up to you to determine how many times to do it, but until you really know what you are doing, conservative is safer than overly aggressive.

The real rule to follow is if your page reads smoothly and adds value to the visitor, you should be O.K.

The Fifth Deadly Sin – Don’t Use Link Farms

Link Farms are sites that are set up just link sites to each other on a free for all basis on the theory that it’s a quick and dirty way to get links to your site. The SEs love links to your site and consider your page more important on the theory that linking to you means that your site must be good.

What the SEs are looking for is “natural” links. They hate link farms. If they see that you are using link farms, they “know” that you are trying to manipulate them and they will punish you for using such obvious disrespect for them.

If you think of search engines as very proud individuals who want respect, you will be much better off. I know that the engines are not really sentient beings, but if you pretend that they are and treat them as such, you won’t be as likely to get into trouble.

The Sixth Deadly Sin – Don’t Make Text Too Small

This is very similar to the Don’t Hide Text Rule. Again, the search engines don’t want you writing just to manipulate them and don’t want you stuffing keywords. By making text too small, they think you are trying to do this.

Think about it. If you are making text too small, are you really writing for people?

The Seventh Deadly Sin – Don’t Use Doorway Pages

Don’t use Doorway Pages designed specifically for search engines or cookie cutter pages. The Search engines will punish you for it. A good article about Doorway Pages has been written by the guru Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167831 .

Google specifically cautions against such pages.

Well bothers and sisters, you now know the Seven Deadly Sins. You can now choose – be a sinner or be a winner.

Dan Foley is CEO of digitalpages http://www.digitalpagesinc.com a website design, website development, and search engine optimization company located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He can be reached at dfoley@digitalpagesinc.com or 952-456-1514.
You may use this article on your site if you will activate the links.

Posted by Dan Foley in SEO at 14:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

According to the BBC, websites have a 94% masculine orientation. The University of Glamorgan did a study of 30 mens' and 30 womens' websites and discovered this bias.

They studied language, visuals, and navigation. They found that men preferred straight lines and women preferred rounded shapes.

Interestingly, the university also discovered that like Professor Higgins in "My Fair Lady", men used more formal or expert language than women. Apparently the women used "Gaaaaw" a lot.

And now for the shocker - men preferred sites designed by men and women preferred sites designed by women.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 22:29 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Getting your website found and still have it look good can be daunting sometimes. You want a website that people will want to look at and read but at the same time be search engine friendly. If you have JavaScript based links, Victoria Selman recommends having html links at the bottom of your page. That is so search engines can read and follow your links for the search bots. Another way that I recommend is to have a site map based on html links that the search engines can read.

You can put the sitemap near the top or near the bottom of your page if you like and your links will become search engine friendly.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 21:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

As a web designer, I have been struggling with CSS. Should I use it? Should I not use it? The problem I have been having with CSS is it is code intensive. Maybe you ae a purist and like to hand code in notepad, but I don't.

I would rather spend my time designing than coding. Additionally, I have a hard time looking at code and visualizing how it is going to show up on a page. Getting code to align properly is also a difficult task - example - if you want to put Google AdSense into a page, it helps to see where you are going to put it. Tables (the bane of CSS) allow me to do this, especially if I'm using a visual editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

Adobe has made some strides with their GoLive CS2 in integrating CSS with their Visual CSS which uses a grid. Watch their live tutorials, however, and they jump out of the Visual CSS the minute they want to get some real work done and are changing the formats and placements in the non-visual CSS panels.

Macromedia's new Dreamweaver 8 seems to be trying to make CSS easier but it seems to be falling short also.

Why is it that with all of the brilliant programmers in the world and in MicrosoftAdobeMacromedia their can't be a true Visual CSS developed? Does website design need to remain that arcane?

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 01:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Hackers are now using Google to find vulnerabilities in corporate, government, and home systems. Security researcher Johnny Long spoke at the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas telling about some of what he has come accross. It isn't Google's fault but the fault of those who haven't tightened their security. Read about it here.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 22:43 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

A few days ago I wrote about how CBS is planning to show interupted programming on the internet. Now I have come across an article about how CBS plans to show news on internet video 7X24.

Consumers will be able to customize the news they watch unlike todays news programming. This is partially do to the convergence of television and the internet. This convergence is supposed to be the reason for the XP Media Center. I saw Microsoft's Home of the Future at the Consumer Electronics Show last January in Vegas using their XP Media Center and it was an embarrasment. If I had been Bill Gates or Steve Balmer, I would have rolled some heads over that one.

The thing about Microsoft though is they eventually make a great product.

Worth noting is an article by Kay Zetkin, about using the Adobe Photoshop pen tool for tracing vectors. I'm continually amazed by Photoshop's versatility.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 18:48 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I don't know if they are using my IP address or a cookie, but Google knows that I am located in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. How do I know that? Because, when I do a search, I've noticed recently that the Google Ads in the right navigation bar state that certain companies in the ads have Minneapolis under the ad. Its not part of the ad, it is seperate.

I don't know if their technology specifically ties my name to the IP address, but it wouldn't take much to tie the two together with a little data mining. As part of my business, I'm pretty free with letting my name out on the net but it is a concern for individual privacy.

Just for kicks, in the middle of writing this, I did a Google search on my name and didn't find me. From a business standpoint that is bad. From a privacy standpoint that is good.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 14:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

In learning to do website design, I have read countless articles and tutorials about design, coding, techniques etc. This information and knowledge has been freely given by people who have a passion for the internet.

Through trial and error and study, it finally dawned on me how to correctly cut and paste things like portions of articles for review and especially snippets of code into web pages. In order to share this information, I have made a video of how to do this and put it on my site.

Please feel free to copy it down and look at it.

Posted by Dan Foley in Website Design at 21:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)