Delete this if against the rule, but... how about this guy?

Maybe im missing the point but dosnt everybody want a good search engine place?

Reporting your competetors because they have a better page rank than you is more unenthical than including a lot of keywords in the page.

Nothing is stopping you guys doing this with your own sites.

I personally think they have the SEO thing nailed, good luck to them.

To be truthful, I didn't even look at the link the first time. I was just addressing the link issue, however, I did go and look at the site this time, and to be truthful, I'm not convinced they even made a conscious SEO effort here (maybe -- hard to tell). I mean, I'm looking at the front page and see spelling and grammar errors (which I attribute to the European heritage of Regina), however, I see a well-constructed site with a lot of very relevant content, and after reviewing about 75% of their pages, I think they did a pretty darn good job. And the list of California cities on the home page appear to be only there to indicate what kind of photography work they do in each.

This is a blatant attempt to fool the engines. I mean they list all the cities where they offer their services, but they repeat them. And nobody is going to read all that.

If they wanted it to be useful for human visitors they could have done something like this:

We provide Service X and Service Y in the following locations:
- Location A
- Location B
- Location C
etc...

Also observe the abudant amount of hidden text at the bottom of the page. Tricksters, I wonder where they rank on Google and Yahoo. My guess, not very well.

Of course everyone wants a good placement, but if you use methods like the one implied here, then whats the point? You run a risk of being penalized which can cost you placement.

The thread is about how amazingly well the site does on MSN.

I dont really see the difference between usual SEO and this cheating you are all talking about.

When does SEO become cheating?
They are only using keywords, we all do that.

Interesting point. They do have a rather interesting combo of meta tags (some of which I hadn't seen used before) and they do "hide" a lot of keyword stuff. Kinda odd...they aren't even using really all that current coding practices. Obviously what they have done is deliberate. To your point, it's curious how MSN overlooks that.

so you think this SEO professional used just some unusual techniks for these results?

what about these websites ?

http://www.pixie-photography.com (Yahoo)
1 page only, no content, it is on the top for "los angeles wedding photographer" etc.

http://www.instantmemories.com/wedding_ ... os_angeles
in MSN. Also not crystal clean.

Msn always allow spammy practices. they are on contrary quite tolerant of spams

I found the culpret folks. Don't treat the symptom - treat the disease

This is the design company for pixel-photography (noted in the link above by cheshirecat) which is formatted identically (for search engine spam. Take a close look at the sites in their portfolio):

http://www.abciwebmarketing.com/our_work.htm

Start with the Doctors of California Laser Cosmetic center link and scroll down. Notice anything familiar there?

The other portfolio links show variations of the same kind of practice. What will really get your goat is when you view the home page:


http://www.abciwebmarketing.com/

If you have the patience to wait until the audio loads you will really laugh your ass off. Please note that most of these pages are extremely slow loads on broadband. I'd hate to think what they are like on dial-up.

//edit - for cheshirecat -- I get the distinct feeling that you may be one of this unethical company's customers?

To be honest I don't see anything unethical here. we have Game - "who is first?" , and rules set by search engines. by rules I mean only their algorithms , nothing else. If you can analyze it and adapt to the rule of each search engine faster and better then others - you will be on the top. everything else is just "Blue Sky Vision and Dream" about ideal search engine and ideal algorithms and results. It would be interesting to hire 2 PROs for 2 separate website with the same content, so 1 PRO will use "dirty, unethical" techniques, and second one - clean, "FINE ART" techniques, and to see who will win in this contest. It would be very very interesting. It is like difference in coding style for programmers, elegant or dirty coding. Main thing is - it should work!

Everybody uses some kind of tricks to fool search engine, of course some of them are elegant solutions and some very simple. but all of them are just tricks, nothing like "ethical" or "unethical", if of course website content is relevant to search. It is much more unethical to complain on your competitors.
I am glad, I am not in this business.

While we don’t have ideal search engine, there always be people who can find holes in it’s algorithms and come up with some trick. It means that there will be always job for you guys.

// nope, I am not their customer.

alright, then if you are not the customer, and you found this post this quickly and chose to participate with this argument, then my next best guess is you are the designer. But, regardless of whether you are here as the customer or designer or neither, I don't believe you are here by accident. Your thoughts and opinions are quite welcome.

I agree with cheshirecat. While none of my sites make me any money if they did i would definatly addopt tactics which some people call unethical.

SEO is all about trying to build your site with the search engine algorithms in mind in order to increase your chance of getting a good place in the results. So if a site builds thier pages in the perfect way to do this then how is it unethical or cheating? Arnt they just playing the game and winning?

If he is the designer then his income is dependent on building sites that rank well with search engines.
Its like saying a butcher is unethical because he sells his steaks half the price as the next guy.
its not dirty tricks or unethical, its just good business.

Basically SEO is not black and white, it is many shades. Therefore I think that how ethical it is is a subjective matter. Some choose to push the limits, some choose to stay safely within them.

However I think the site in question is pushing way past the limits and is risking a penalty. If this was performed by an SEO company then if this site gets penalised it is only serving to further harm the SEO field (ok just the tiniest bit but it all adds up).

Time spent figuring out new ways to push the limits would be better spend increasing link popularity and creating quality content IMO.

Hey Guys

A question in this regard. That guy has duplicates of his keywords but what about say if the keyword was duplicated on all of the following pages but not the first one?

As spammy as the site looks I don't think that they were trying to fool anyone...if they were they did a very bad job! For maximum effect they should have turned all those locations in to internal links and then created a page for each section...

DodgeCroft...if I understand you correctly...yes they would have better off to include those terms on interior pages...and even better if they linked them to internal pages or back to the front page...it would give them some relevant internal links for those terms.

As for MSN results...give it a year...their index is currently filld with some very poorly optimized sites...there's one site that ranks ahead of me....I have over 4000 links pointing to my page and he has 12....so I think we can say MSN is not looking at incoming links as very important....as for my competitior his page is very very dense in keywords...so that could be a major factor in the msn algo.