Google bans website? Probably not as evil as it seems.

[1]: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/004754.htm
[2]: http://www.thepeoplescube.com/red/viewtopic.php?t=637
[3]: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-check-your-own-site/
[4]: http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thepeoplescube.com%2FTruth.php&ei=UTF-8&u=www.thepeoplescube.com/Truth.php&d=BqFbHG1aMZ7v&icp=1&.intl=us

There’s a little chatter out there concerning a site I’d never heard of called [The People’s Cube][2]. They appear to have been banned by Google. Since they are apparently a politically right-leaning site, conspiracy theories flew and the apparent banning [drew more attention][1]. But it seems most likely they simply got caught doing a sneaky little thing to boost their search engine rankings.

Search engines “read” web pages to see what’s in them. But, in general, they aren’t good readers, and can be fooled by putting words in the page and then “hiding” them using things like CSS. But those words may make the search less effective, so Google sometimes manually removes web sites that do that to help ensure reliable search results.

There’s a good description of what probably happened [here][3]. And a cached version at Yahoo! is [here][4], where my geek friends can look at the source code.

Note to self: No sneaky SEO tricks.

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