Swiping website keywords

tint45 · August 10, 2007

I know it's not illeagal or anything, but my boss has noticed that some companies in the area have been using keywords for products that we use and they don't and at least one company has obviously just copied and pasted the tags from our site for theirs. It is evident in that the string is word for word identical and lists services that I know this company does not offer. Just curious what you all think about this practice. :beach

August 10, 2007

I have keywords on there for EVERYTHING.

Anything I can do to raise up my spot on the search engines the better.

I at least keep it tint related though. But nothing wrong with a good meta tag.

Roach · August 10, 2007

I'd have to agree. Just because you use a keyword doesn't mean you are claiming to offer said services and or products. It's just a way to get hits to your site. At that point, your services would be presented to them.

-R

tint45 · August 10, 2007

Good points. :beach Alright, keywords-fine. What about an obvious copy and past situation?

Cuttingedge · August 10, 2007

All is fair in love and war...and meta tags...

TintDude · August 10, 2007

Most SE's don't even pay attention to anything other than the description tag, the keywords tag had been so abused that they just don't even look at them anymore...It's all about what is on the page and how many people link to it from similar context sites...as long as you don't link back to those sites, they consider that link trading an attempt to influence position and will discount that was well. They are fighting spammers so hard that legitimate sites get hurt along the way. :thumb

August 10, 2007

Copy and paste?

Well a million Willies with a million typewriters would have eventually put those words, punctuation, and spaces into that order.

I would never go so far as to embed my competitors names into my page just to try to get a search engine to bring up my page instead of theirs, but nothing wrong with "Madico, Llumar, V-Kool, Huper Optik, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Atlanta, Marietta, Global, Tint" etc etc etc etc

jhu1321 · August 10, 2007

I would choose to have the integrity to do research and figure out what would be most effective for my business rather than simply copy what a competitor already did. While keywords may not play an important role anymore the issue at hand is ethics behind simply copying off of someone. I guess that's what you do when your tinting business is a part time job and you don't have time to do the work thats needed to make it effective. :thumb

mjs · August 11, 2007

... the keywords tag had been so abused that they just don't even look at them anymore...It's all about what is on the page and how many people link to it from similar context sites.

That's about all you really need to know if you have a quality site and want to do well in the search engines.

The ones that do use meta keywords don't put much emphasis on them. As an example, I once put up a test page with a keyword phrase that wasn't mentioned anywhere on the site. The only place I could find it for that search term was around #145 in Yahoo.

The one time the copy/paste can hurt you is if they're doing it with your actual content, since some engines will have a duplicate content penalty, thanks to scraper sites & deceptive mirrors. If you have an established site and a new/crap site is copying you, it will likely hurt them, not you.

Also, it's best to focus on the traffic that matches your site, rather than traffic you'd like to take from someone else's. For example, if you refuse to use anything other than Brand A film, there's no reason for your keyword tag to look like this: "Brand A, Brand B, Brand C, Brand D, Brand E, etc..." In other words, when someone gets there from a search engine, their first thought shouldn't be, "Why am I here?"

It's like people that sell a Timex on eBay and put "NOT a Rolex Tag Breitling Omega" in the title... like they're really going to convert people searching for those brands.

mjs · August 11, 2007

Your site is actually a good example of where search engines do look for keywords. You have "limo tint" in your page title and right at the top of the page, so search engines will think that's what the page is about. You have it repeated at the bottom, but some crawlers will only grab the first portion of the page, so that may or may not help.

You don't have a keyword meta tag (no big deal), but it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to add a description tag. Some directories & search engines will check there first, or create their own description from random text pulled from the page. It's nice to be able to choose your own description when you can.

Anchor text in links from relevant websites helps as well, so I'll help you dominate the limo search results: :lol