"Digital Equipment Corp.'s search service began filtering Web sites through a program that analyzes documents for repetitions, long lists of keywords, and links to deceptively named Web pages. The effort, coordinated by AltaVista ''Minister of Defense'' Edgar Whipple, has so far resulted in barring about 100 Web sites from the service's index."

The article mentioned that some people were even adding keywords to their pages that had nothing to do with the page's contents. For example, after the death of Princess Diana, some unscrupulous Web masters added words like "Diana", "death", and "car crash" to their pages and meta tags!

I'm a long time advocate of educating Web site owners in ways to achieve good rankings on keywords and phrases that are RELEVANT to their Website. However, in the long run, you are only hurting yourself by employing deceptive practices. Nobody wants to search for a topic and find a bunch of sites that are completely irrelevant because of deceptive practices employed by a few sleazy Web masters. As an illustration of this form of stupidity, I recently searched InfoSeek for the keyword "monkey" and was returned a number of Websites among them one that read,

"Monkey Boy: You don't care about monkeys! You want sex! Click here for great dirty pictures..."

Can you believe it! Guess what? I didn't visit the site, and they didn't get my money. The moral (of course, these folks didn't have any - morals, that is), there's not much value in off-topic promotion. People searching for a particular topic aren't frequently enticed to visit a site for something irrelevant to why they began their search in the first place. Focus on gaining great rankings for relevant keywords instead - it makes much better business sense.

Perhaps more importantly, if you're caught you could be banned. In some situations you will never get your site listed on that engine again. AltaVista's new initiative is further proof that being conservative and honest can be profitable.

Finally, be very careful about using your competitor's name in your meta tags. There has already been one lawsuit concerning a company that used a competitor's name in their meta-tag but not on their Website. You could be charged with trademark infringement, at least if you're hiding company names just in the meta tags (especially stupid if you include the name of a law firm that specializes in on-line law into your meta tags - talk about putting your head in the lion's mouth!). In the United States, you can legally make comparisons to your competition in your advertising, although even this is illegal in certain countries, so proceed with caution.

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