Fairfax Blackhat SEO
Is Fairfax digital doing blackhat SEO? @krigsi was looking at wedding.com.au today & I asked him to check to see what H1 formatting they had on the front page. This is what he found.
A Blackhat technique
I’ve replaced < & > with —
-- h1 --
-- a href="/" --
--span--Wedding - Wedding Supplies, Wedding Dresses, Wedding Flowers & More --/span--
--/a--
When he examined the CSS he found this
div#header #header-content h1 span {
clear:both;
content:"";
display:block;
height:0;
line-height:0;
overflow:hidden;
visibility:hidden;
}
The first think that jumped out at me was that the font size and the line size were 0. The visibility was also "hidden". Basically they are showing keyword rich text to Google & hiding it from the users. As I understand Google’s terms of service, this would breach them.
The code above serves no purpose in the structure of the page. It exists purely for search bots to find. The reason this is probably hidden is that they do not want to have it as part of the design. However Google doesn’t want to see it either if it’s not there for the users.
In 2007 Google booted BMW Germany & Ricoh Germany for employing a cloaking technique that showed design heavy sites to users but keyword rich text & links to Google. The Fairfax technique is no where near that deception but it is still something Google would not be happy with. @iSamith then found that Fairfax owns 30,000 domains. We checked a couple. concreters.com.au, business.com.au etc etc were all using the same technique. Fairfax owns a lot of generic URLs which rank well for generic phrases i.e. wedding.com.au ranks no.1 for "wedding". When you consider most of these sites’ revenue model is advertising which relies on impressions coming from organic search, this could have a major impact on their bottom line should they get booted from the index.
Whether this technique was employed innocently by a designer I have no idea but Google won’t care given its past form.
What would you do if it was your search engine? Would you boot them?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
