Hidden Content/Cloaking – Any day can be April Fool’s Day

Benj Arriola — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:25:00 +0000

The Internet goes wild on April Fool’s day. This year, you may have noticed some already from Google’s CADIE, YouTube’s mirror image and the one I liked was Reddit’s pages were redesigned on various parts of their site that look like Digg, Fark, Slashdot and maybe more.

Here at BusinessOnLine, as mentioned in our last years April Fool’s Day blog post, we work hard and we play hard. For some reason, everyone seemed so busy with client projects that no well coordinated prank was executed this day of the pranks in 2009.

But since we do play hard aside from work hard, any day here can be like April Fool’s day. An earlier prank happened on March 4, 2009. This is the office cubicle of our HR manager.

And in this prank we did, blackhat hidden content. We cloaked the HR’s office.

Too bad, all of us never saw Trevor’s reaction that day. He usually comes in at 5:00am. Too early for the rest of the company.

Any day can be April Fool’s Day here at BusinessOnLine.

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It’s No Fun Being Sick

Ray "Catfish" Comstock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:04:00 +0000

Being sick is the worst. I’ll leave it that…lol. Having a sick Web site (a Web site without valid HTML code) is not such a good thing either. However, it probably isn’t affecting your search rankings. In this post, Google Super Spam Fighter Matt Cutts confirms what many of us have believed for a long time, that Google doesn’t penalize sites for invalid code. However, that isn’t an excuse not to write valid code, lol. It just means it doesn’t have that much potential to affect your search listings.

In other search news, the Online Marketing Summit is coming soon and I will be speaking there about various SEO themes. OMS was a great conference last year and I anticipate it will be even better this year (how can San Diego in February be bad?).

Also, if anyone is wondering about the power of links in Google, they need only do a search for “3 ring binders”. The number 2 ranking site is http://www.3ringbinder.com/ . Now the reason its noteworthy is because if you look at the cache for the site, there is no content! Now obviously, if you look at the page itself, there is some actual content available to the end user and I am certainly not saying that this site doesn’t deserve its ranking. I have never used their services..lol. But Google sees NO content on their homepage. And yet they are ranked #2 for a word that should be somewhat competitive given the propensity for that word to result in sales of 3 ring binders. So, it should be noted that this also illustrates the advantages of having a keyword focused domain name. The majority of Web masters use URLs and not keyword focused text links to link to Web pages. Therefore, having your keywords in your URL automatically means that most of your links will be keyword focused, thereby giving you an advantage over your competitors who do not. This doesn’t justify changing a domain name in most cases, but it certainly adds to the merit of choosing a domain name that is keyword focused in the initial stages of a Web site.

That’s all for today. I am going home to rest.

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BusinessOnLine SEO Blog - Search Engine Marketing techniques for 3rd generation SEO» Cloaking

Hidden Content/Cloaking – Any day can be April Fool’s Day

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It’s No Fun Being Sick

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