Is Hutchison 3G Doing Something Odd with Their Website?
Hutchison 3G UK seems to be doing something odd with their website, according to reports on websites that are dedicated to the "dark art" of search engine optimisation. According to reports on the DigitalPoint discussion forums, Hutch 3G UK has engaged in some very aggressive optimization techniques which are helping their website appear at the top of the results when people use Google to search for mobile phones.
The blue shaded zone are adverts - 3 appears first in the so-called "organic results".
Most companies - including ourselves - who operate websites will want it to appear near the top of the page when a person uses Google to search for relevant information. However, sometimes companies can bend the rules to try and gain an unnatural advantage. If a company goes too far, then the search engines may even block the whole website. This happened fairly famously with BMW's German website which broke the rules, and suddenly found itself barred from Google for a while.
What Hutch 3G UK, or their outside SEO company seems to have done is buy a vast number of text adverts on a large number of websites - each with the same keytext. Part of the algorithm used by Google to decide how to rank websites for search terms is how many other websites have hyperlinks to your website. The more links - to a degree - the better you will do. Typically, websites should link to each other because the editor of the webpage felt the link was a good one. However, websites can sometimes accept payment for adding a link to their website when they would not normally have done do.
Paying a large number of websites to link to your website can offer a quite considerable boost to how your website ranks in Google.
Now, this is not totally against the rules, but comments from people such as Matt Cutts - who heads up the anti-spam team at Google does suggest that they don't like it when websites seek to buy links on websites as opposed to earning them legitimately.
Regardless of how Google views this move by 3, it is quite an aggressive move by their website team, and shows a renewed determination to increase sales via its online marketing channel.
Examples of some of the websites where the paid for links are appearing on:
Rachel Nichols - Celebrity Gossip Site
The Cross of St George - English Nationalism
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Posted to the site on 23rd February 2007