Beware of SEO specialists offering new pages

Many readers will already have hear of doorway / feeder / champion pages that are created as a means of creating search engine friendly site content that links to your homepage and therefore negates the need to optimise any of the content that is currently on your website. Some SEO companies will register a new domain name for you (so ultimately they control any traffic they get before being penalised) while others will build pages onto your site.

However to help forever banish the debate as to whether this is spam or not - a recent post on one of Google's senior developers blog stated:

"If “undetectable to search engines” is listed as one of the major selling points of a particular link scheme, it probably violates our quality guidelines and the guidelines of other major search engines.

The “undetectable” claim brought up fond memories of another time someone claimed to me that their spam was undetectable. It was November 2002, so cue up the wavy time-warp special effect and let’s go back in time.

I had just removed a very large data recovery website from Google. They asked me why their website appeared to be penalized. I replied with this email:

Pages like
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-cw.html
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-dr.html
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-mn.html
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-aa.html
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-it.html
http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com/data-recovery-software-gl.html

appear to have garbage doorways with text about random SCSI things.
Visiting those pages in Internet Explorer just redirects to your
homepage. Using doorways + sneaky redirects is a serious violation
of Google’s spam guidelines. In order to relist you (and it will take
about 7-8 weeks), we need to have clear evidence that all these pages
are gone, and that we won’t see these sort of tricks on your domain
again.

Matt"

Word from the wise - Feel free to use this when qualifying whether or not the techniques offered by a prospective SEO you are talking to are genuinely ethical or not.
Scott Howard
digitalAim

New regulations on Company Information Online

Due to changes at the start of Jan (07) via what is called a "Statutory Instrument" all companies should now specify their company registration number, place of registration, and your registered business address somewhere on your website. This statutory instrument has been used to update to the First Company Law of 1985.

The company info does not need to appear on every page of the website but will need to appear in email footers. While many websites will already show this required information in the likes of your About us, Legals or Contact Us pages, others will need to update theirs in the coming months. Much like the disability discrimination act, it is unlikely that the law will be ruthlessly enforced in the short term (especially when the Statutory Instrument was passed after the proposed start date of 1.1.07)

Ecommerce Regulations, (miss-named due to legal confusion around the definition of E-Commerce) passed in 2002, states that certain basic information is listed on any commercial site. The law specifies that the following should be visible- "where the service provider is registered in a trade or similar register available to the public, details of the register in which the service provider is entered and his registration number, or equivalent means of identification in that register".

The legal community have been busy defining the definition above as including the company registration no. and place of registration. The Ecommerce Regulations also require specification of the registered office address.
making the mistake of thinking that the Ecommerce Regulations do not apply to websites that do not sell online (in fact they apply to almost all websites).

In simple terms the information to be show somewhere within each site:

Your name, trading address and email address of the service provider.
The name of the organisation with which the customer is actually entering into a contract. ( Even if this is different from the trading name - eg. Scott Howard trading as digitalAim).

It is not acceptable to the law to just include a 'contact us' form without also providing a valid email address (good news for spamers) and a physical address that has visible prominence on the site. A registered office address should be acceptable for Ecom businesses that do not want to divulge their physical address. If the business is a limited company of plc, the registered office address must be also included as a mandatory.
For registered companies the company registration number should be shown and in turn, under the Companies Act, the place of registation should be shown alongside. If the business is VAT registered then the number should be shown.

Our advice would be that this information be contained in a seperate 'legal information' or 'company information'. When designing or approving your site map remember that the link to this information need not neccesarily be part of the primary navigation and could quite easily be an underlined text link from your about us page. PLC's and Private Finance Initiative companies may choose to make their compliance more visible than most.

Author - Scott Howard