extreme SEO measures

[esllou]

have just been on a soccer site and "something" wasn't right about this article I was reading.

looked at the source code and saw that every occurence of words such as it, the, that, is, this, there, etc was an image! The page had 149 examples of it.gif, that.gif and so on.

Each one was only about 100 bytes. It can't have helped things that much. when I started to play around with font sizes, the page fell apart completely.

Anyone else have EXTREME examples of SEO'ing?

[profitpuppy]

Did you check out the names of the images, and the alt tags on the images?

... Just out of interest....

[larryhatch]

Very interesting, new to me at least.

Just from what you wrote (feel free to sticky me the URL) it looks like:
a) The Webmaster wants to increase his KW density by eliminating
common words from the counts -or-
b) There was a perception that such common words incur some kind of penalty.

a) sounds more likely, but I doubt it would have any real benefit.
Such an obvious ploy could even be a liability, assuming its noticed at all.

Far more obvious is the TITLE of one site I found.
That runs from here to the garage, jammed with keywords, some repeted
3 times in a row, and including everything from Cydonia to Walt Disney.

That page ranks #1 or #2 out of millions for the main keyword, on Google
and Yahoo. It looks like the guy successfully gamed them both. - Larry

[profitpuppy]

Which keywords do they rank for? have you tried any thing similar?

that remarkalble... you think a title like that would attract huge SE penalties.

[larryhatch]

Hello Profitpuppy:

I find it absolutely amazing. I would NEVER try a stunt like that.
Main keyword is simply [snip]. Google that up, or try Yahoo.
Page will be #1 or #2 depending. View the page source.
Look at the TITLE attribute. Then look at DESCRIPTION.
I can't fathom how they get away with it, they've been up top for years now.

Its the worst case of keyword stuffing I have ever seen in my niche.
Even the 302 redirect scum won't try this. -Larry

[edited by: pageoneresults at 12:29 pm (utc) on April 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]

[profitpuppy]

unbelievable.... but Google shows 3,770 backlinks, MSN, yahoo (not nearly as many). I guess it just goes to show that you don't have to have stock standard SEO site to do well in SE's. Depending on the category, links always seem to weigh into the equation more than traffic or great content.

After the recent google update, 1 of our sites shot to PR 5 (and it's a load of trash with hardly any links). Other sites I've been working on for weeks with more than 1500 links on msn and yahoo still aren't even indexed by g. they are about 2 months older as well.

seems like google has one set of rules for some keywords and another set of rules for [snip] sites....

[edited by: pageoneresults at 12:34 pm (utc) on April 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]

[larryhatch]

3770 incoming backlinks? Ooof! That must explain it.
I'd like to know where the majority of those come from. -Larry

[pageoneresults]

At this point I'm going to lock this topic. I did remove the last two replies as they were off topic and not relevant to this post.

Please bear in mind that we prefer not to get into specifics such as this when it comes to SEO. If you have issues with what you find in the SERPs, most of the SEs have an outlet where you can report your findings if you choose to do so.

Thanks in advance for your understanding.