Any time folks figure out that Google is giving an advantage in search results, there are packs of black-hat SEO wolves descending to take advantage.  In the old days it was a lot easier to spot them: keyword stuffing, scraping content, cloaking, and other nefarious methods of tricking the search engines.  As someone who has been working in the behavioral health field for over 10 years, I have seen it all.  Although it takes a lot more work, money, and energy (and time) to get good results in Google by creating a quality site that is regularly updated with original, high-quality content, the benefit over the long run is that you never have to worry about being “hit” by a major algorithm correction.

Now, I call it an algorithm correction because that’s really what it is.  Google discovers there is a problem with their algorithm that is being exploited by lazy website owners, they make an adjustment, lazy website owners disappear from the top results.

So let’s talk about the impact of review spam in Google Places.  It has been singularly frustrating for me because I manage the SEO for what is considered the first Malibu Model of drug rehabs – Promises Treatment Centers. In fact, we have trademarked the term “Malibu Model” because Promises established this type of program almost two decades ago.  Of course, many rehabs have followed, some of dubious quality.

The biggest frustration is to have a Malibu address but never have your rehab show up on the map in Malibu.  For a while, Google Boost helped, but that tool was soon ended by Google.  Then they created “AdWords Express” which is like AdWords without any actual functionality. It’s truly bizarre. You can’t choose your relevant keywords – it does it for you, and not very well I must say.

I continue to examine why lesser rehabs do so well on the Malibu map and I’ve come to the conclusion that many have done so through phony reviews.  To me, this is particularly damaging to Google’s credibility.  I’m telling you that Promises would NEVER ask our clients to review us for a search engine. It’s distasteful at best, and unethical at worst.  We would be happy if some decided to do it on their own, but really, who wants to show up as reviewing a drug rehab?  There is still too much of a stigma associated.

How have other rehabs dealt with this? They have simply asked their SEO folks to create fake accounts and write fake reviews.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the reviews are hogwash – but here are  a few tell-tale signs.

1. The reviewer has only written one review, or if they have written a few reviews they are all associated with the same business type.

2. The reviewer has a remarkable grasp of the value of keywords in their review title.  Instead of writing a headline:   “Truly a wonderful place to get better” which would be a very natural one, they write “Drug Rehab Program Malibu” – right, that sounds like what a normal person would use as a headline in a review.

3. All the reviews are 5 stars.  Really?  Not one thing wrong?  20 people reviewed you as PERFECT?  Heck, even Michelin star restaurants get their share of 2-star reviews.

4. All the reviews are clustered around the same day or week. People generally hire outside SEO for a short time so they have to get those reviews up and done for them.

I never just look at how many stars a business gets. I always read the reviews.  You can spot the phony ones very quickly if you read a lot of reviews. You can also spot the phony reviews by competitors trying to harm a business.  This is another disgusting practice that I have seen friends suffer through on Yelp – haven’t quite seen it yet in Google Places, but you can bet it’s happening.

By reading reviews thoroughly you can generally get a sense of their authenticity and avoid choosing the wrong business – such as a rehab where you are sending a loved one with the hopes that they will find recovery from addiction.

Below this post is an image grab of a great example of phony SEO reviews. This particular rehab used to do very well in regular results by spamming – they would write daily junk press releases – Google did catch onto that and they plummeted in results. They are now doing phony review spam so they at least do well in local searches – and it is working like gangbusters for them (until Google catches on – hopefully soon!)

Clearly, spam has been a problem from the beginning for Google and every other search engine. Those who make money by taking short cuts will always try to stay one step ahead of Google, but in the end I have to believe that quality content will rule the day.

You have your users with IE 6, some using Firefox (particularly snobby bunch who tend to be designers who think it is the ONLY browser worth using, and, apparently, designing for – the rest of the public using other browsers be damned), some on Safari, and a growing percentage on IE 6.

Why should all these different browsers be a concern to Internet marketers? Because web sites have a tendency to look different in each of them, depending on how clean the code is. This is particularly true if you use table-less designs and primarily use cascading style sheets (css) for placement of items on the page.
Rule of thumb: look at your website in as many browsers and browser versions as possible. Clean mark up will lessen the problem, but I know even top-notch designers/coders can find some of the differences between IE6 and IE7 frustrating.

So if you don’t want a chunk of your visitors seeing your type floating over or disappearing behind images, be sure to validate your code, but also, LOOK AT IT in other browsers.

I just had an experience with a new site I took over – it claimed to validate perfectly – had it’s little w3.org validate banner – and it does validate – but it is a total spider trap and the Google spider can not get into the site to index it for searchers.

Bizarre but true – 100% validated code can still contain spider traps and kill your SEO!

You can do something on your site – but because some jerk spammers did this in spades at some point, what you thought was perfectly okay is now an offense to Google’s sense of all that is right and good in the world ( their unofficial motto being “don’t be evil” ) and you get shoved out with the flotsam and jetsam of so many really bad sites. This can be particularly disconcerting if you have had a site for 7 or 8 years and it did reasonably well and your ad revenue meant the site essentially paid for itself. There are many hobby sites out there like this – and it’s a shame they end up in Google’s dustbin.

I was thinking I just coined a new phrase – Googledygook

Based on the phrase gobbledygook:

gobbledygook: incomprehensible or pompous jargon of specialists

However, it appears in doing a Google search (oh irony) that others have already come up with this term and in fact someone is squatting on the domain name (grin).

Actually I have coined a phrase in the past – back in January 1999 I bought the domain cybercilious.com – I thought it was a fun play on supercilious – it was tongue-in-cheek because back then there were folks charging INSANE amounts of money for web design – people were really getting royally ripped off. I would hear about someone paying 100K for a site that basically didn’t work very well. I’ve never really used the domain for much, and some people mistake it for thinking I’m the one who is haughty – LOL no way, my designs are simple at best, downright ugly at worst. Many of those people who thought they were indispensable so they could charge obscene amounts have now sadly seen their jobs shipped off to India and Pakistan.

Anyway, I think I thought someone would make the phrase popular (clearly I am too lazy to do all the things necessary to popularize an idea) and then I’d be offered 100 grand for it….almost 8 years later I’m getting tired of how slow everyone is to catch on to how brilliant a name this is – oh, I’m being supercilious now

If you’ve ever had a strong position for years and years and suddenly lost it, you realize how powerful Google can be to destroy a legitimate online presence. Survival of the fittest isn’t a perfect science. We know many lovely species have disappeared off the face of the earth – they didn’t deserve to survive any less, and just as these many species have fallen victim to human greed and indifference, so many quality web sites will fall victim to the indifference of the Google algorithm.