Search Rank blog: SEO Patterns, Ad Patterns and Search Engines

The article I posted yesterday http://www.searchrank.com/blog/2007/08/link-seller-caveats.html talks about not making link buying obvious. It got me thinking about how search engines are able to spot the obvious. When it comes to SEO we all know to vary the link anchor text coming from external links when link building. The same is true of paid ads. I've always thought (as David pointed out in his article) using a graphic would be a good way to keep ad information away from indexing robots. My take on paid ads and optimization being found by robots is to break the pattern.

Search engine robots are automated programs, there is only so much a software program is able to detect. Humans created the program, however clever it is. If your optimization pattern is broken up, how can an automated program detect exactly what is going on? The same is true of paid ads. If the ad text cannot be found on the page, if the ad text is not in the text links, if the ALT text has no ad information then common sense says detection is difficult at best.

Human programming is fallible and automated detection of text on the web page is based on recognizing patterns. Human detection may be part of what Google would use to find ads in their newfound mission to eradicate paid ads from websites. How feasible is it for Google to detect ads manually compared to automatically? You know the answer to that one. So the choice is, be clever and break the pattern.

Search Rank blog: Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links

David Wallace of SearchRank has an interesting article about link buying. I agree with his concepts on keeping things less obvious when selling links:
Things That Bug Me Regarding Those Who Sell Links