Search Engine Forensics

Fingerprints Website DNA Footprints

These words sound like terms you would hear on CSI, the popular Crime Scene Investigation television show but actually, these are Search Engine Marketing terms. These three words describe things about your site that tell search engines and your competition, who you are, how you built your site, and what you are trying to accomplish. Many times this "evidence" will tell people things you probably do not want them to know especially if you use any type of page generating software to build "doorway" type pages or do anything that the search engines might deem as "black hat" SEO.

Fingerprints:

There are specific items on your page that "tell all". In many cases this is something that is repeated over and over through the entire site, but not always. A basic example is any type of repeated text on your pages.

Here is an example of a fingerprint:

Lets say you downloaded a free PHP script called "SOME SCRIPT", and on every page that "SOME SCRIPT" creates there is a small text on the bottom of the page that reads "this site powered by SOME SCRIPT". Seems harmless right? Well as long as the search engines have no problem with the script then you're fine, but if they decide to have a problem with "SOME SCRIPT" then you're in big trouble. It is an easy task for them to find every site with  "this site powered by SOME SCRIPT" and either penalize it or ban it altogether.  As a matter of fact, once this article is indexed, you can probably type  those words in Google and find every copy of this article published.

It is not just Search Engines that use fingerprints to find out things about your site, link spammers can use that same technique to find and abuse your blog, guest book, or forum.

Website DNA:

Website DNA tells who you are. Your website DNA is found in places like the Whois database, your web-host IP, affiliate or merchant ID's, ect. Like our DNA, website DNA always give you away, it does not lie. If you are not doing things "by the book", you better make sure your websites DNA is hard to find.

Footprints:

Footprints are things that lead the search engines and your competitors to your website and your websites DNA. I see a lot of marketers ignoring footprints and it can really come back to bite them later.

There is a HUGE footprint I have been seeing a lot lately. The building of  "Adsense sites" (sites that are built to attract clicks to Google Ads) has become very popular among Internet Marketers. A popular technique to attract search engine spiders for these sites is called "Blog and Ping". A blog is created for the sole purpose of posting a bunch of keyword filled post with links back to the "Adsense site".  The process has been shown to work but what they fail to realize is that by leaving that blog up even after their site has been spidered, they are leaving a huge footprint behind. There are many bloggers and White Hat SEO enthusiast that love tracking down and reporting "Adsense sites" and the forgotten blog leads them right to it!

If you walk on that thin line between white and black hat SEO, keep these three things in mind when you make your sites. There is a new software program out that was designed taking all these things in consideration, it can be found at http://www.trafficlooter.com and it leaves NO fingerprints behind.