Recently Internet Marketer and SEO Jonathan Leger recently revealed a interesting trick that one of his affiliates is using to grab top rankings in the SERPs and pocket a lot of cash.
The sneaky trick he is using is actually pretty creative – though I don’t think I’d be brave enough to use it. It involves using “Framesets” to trick Google….
Now Jonathan isn’t advocating this technique in his post, (wink wink) and that he’s just recognizing the cleverness of his affiliate and giving credit where credit is due, but there are some dangers here to following the in this affiliates footsteps as you’ll see in a moment.
IF you were to follow down this path and use a browser frameset to show Google something different then what a real user would see – I personally think you are living on borrowed time.
Here’s how it works:
<html>
<head>
<title>PAGE TITLE</title>
<META name=”description” content=”product description”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”product keywords”>
</head>
<frameset rows=”100%,*” border=”0″>
<frame src=”http://myaffiliatelink.com/” frameborder=”0″ />
<frame frameborder=”0″ noresize />
</frameset>
<body>
<div>
(250 WORDS OR SO OF UNIQUE CONTENT GO HERE)
</div>
</body>
</html>
In a nutshell what is happening here is that by using a frameset in the section of the page ABOVE the BODY tag, you redirect the visitor to your affiliate link, while at the same time also adding the requisite amount of unique content that Google wants to see INTO the BODY of the page.
As a result Google ends up counting that the text in the BODY as content on the page, BUT web browsers won’t and just ignore it so the visitor doesn’t ever actually see it.
On the surface it’s pretty clever way of gamming the system however it is not without risk.
First of all let me say, never, did I say NEVER do this on a domain that you want to keep indexed because Google WILL deindex your site if and when their manual reviews find it.
And trust me they WILL find it, if you are absolutely dominating the serps because your competitors and OTHER affiliates will turn you in.
The fact is that doing something like this is considered “Black Hat” SEO and is a clear breech of Google’s terms of service because in effect you are putting text on a page that the end user cant see – and doing so in order to rank the site.
These type of tricks do work short term – but in the long term the hassle of having to set up a new domain and get it ranked and the new pages indexed makes it not worth the effort.
On the other side of the coin – if you used this technique on what I call a “throw-away” domain, and you managed to squeeze out a few grand before Google hammers the site, well… it just might be worth it.
You make the call.
Let me know what you guys think?
