SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

We’re not talking laundry here. In fact, this is a very real and very serious matter for any web entrepreneur.

Before we continue, we want to emphasize that we don’t practice such techniques nor do we condone them. We simply want to bring this to the attention of the community. We certainly do NOT recommend the use of such techniques. While this situation rarely happens, it could happen to anyone so be prepared to handle it by having other traffic sources like indirect traffic through article submissions and pay-per-click programs.

Google Washing as it is named, is an unethical SEO practice where a site’s pages can be “washed out” of the search engine results pages by duplicate content. Google’s own Matt Cutt’s site was nowhere to be seen when content was duplicated from his blog in the beginning of October. The Google search engine duplicate filters are turned on high and no one is exempt — not even a Google employee. Google so far has had trouble differentiating the source of the content and it can, as the above example shows, happen to anyone.

There are two ways people can get ranked. Either push someone down or work to pull themselves up. This practice can be maliciously used by a competitor to remove a site from the rankings by applying the former, much easier method. This unethical practice is not unlike Google Bowling in its evil nature.

We’ll cover some other ways you can continue to optimize your site while gain the benefits of links and traffic at the same time in a later article.

We covered Google Bombing in an earlier post and how the method can be extended to influencing your own search engine rankings.

Google Bowling, however, is quite different and very real. It is used by unscrupulous online competitors whose sole interest is to sabotage your business by getting it banned or penalized from the search results.

Google opened up this possibility when it started addressing the widespread link popularity manipulation of sites obtaining an excessive number of site-wide text links (notice we mentioned excessive, one or two small site-wides shouldn’t hurt but be careful about overdoing it). Google filtered these sites by penalizing or removing the site from its database.

Unscrupulous competitors saw an opportunity in this. If buying site-wide text link ads can get their site penalized by Google, what would happen if they bought it for their competitors instead?

The implications of this technique, if unaddressed, could be devastating to small businesses affected *and* to Google. Google could suffer because the perception that search results are more relevant is the only thing that gives Google the edge in the search market at the moment. Without a positive perception of it’s search results, search users could turn to other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. Such an exodus would drive Google’s search advertising revenue down and cause it to lose huge market share. There is already a growing number of people who dislike Google’s treatment of websites.

A possible solution would be to simply discount such site-wide links altogether and not penalize it. This can be seen in Yahoo’s discounting the value of site-wide links and no longer putting a large weight behind a bunch of links coming from a few sites. Google, however, may still treat the sudden increase in links as unnatural behavior and ban it. If that happens and it really wasn’t your fault, consider a reinclusion request covered earlier.

There’s an interesting look at the way search engine spiders actually read the data on your web pages from SEO BlackHat here.

You can organize your data through a process of linearization which can increase the value of your existing on-page factors and the actual content. Everything will be placed in proper context and you’ll be able to control what the spiders see and how they see it by using the power of CSS layouts instead of tables in your web page design.