I hope my grandchildren don’t peek over my shoulder as I write this tip. “Stupid” is a bad word in their family and they would be scandalized to hear their dear grandmother using it.

But I am highly annoyed. I did a spot check of some of my keyword phrases for a local city for my own website. I showed up respectably in most cases in the 4th or 5th position. But the dude outranking me in the #2 or #3 spot was using a boatload of awful SEO techniques.

His site was poorly presented. It had duplicate pages for numerous cities throughout California. Hint, he wasn’t local but pretended to be by having the same copy with different cities plugged into the copy for different pages.

Then his footer was full of his keyword phrases for different cities.

This is something I would never do for a client. And, supposedly, Google is wise to this kind of thing and suppresses these types of sites. But they aren’t. Oh, eventually they get wise. Another guy did the same thing a few years back and he no longer shows up.

I also checked my rankings on the up and coming DuckDuckGo, a privacy search engine and the bad dude didn’t show up at all. I showed up nice and pretty in #1, #2, or #3 positions depending on the search query. Yahoo and Bing searches yielded similar results.

What’s with Google?

I look forward to the day when Google isn’t the only game in town. Maybe, then, they’ll get their act together.

By the way, it was nice to see the techniques I use for Google worked very well with all the other search engines.

Easy Web Tip 302: Don’t use bad SEO techniques even if Google sometimes rewards them.