Goldilocks’ website uses Blackhat SEO?

Jericho from the PMT Forum noticed last week that when he Googled the bakeshop “Red Ribbon,” what appeared at the top of the search results was, surprisingly, the website of Red Ribbon’s competitor, Goldilocks.

I did the same search but to narrow down the results, I used the keywords “Red Ribbon Bakeshop” and, indeed, the website of Goldilocks Bakeshop appears as the #3 result.

This surely is a rewarding online tactic for the Goldilocks website. Any visitor searching for Red Ribbon in Google might, upon finding Goldilocks’ site on top of the results, decide to buy from Goldilocks instead of Red Ribbon. It’s like wanting to eat a McDonald’s burger but discovering that a Jollibee store is just a few steps away while the closest McDonald’s outlet is a kilometer away.

Now, you ask, how come the Goldilocks website was on top of the search results for “Red Ribbon” and “Red Ribbon Bakeshop?”

Blame it on Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Simply speaking, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving and tweaking a website in order to appear at the top of the search results for a particular keyword.

Websites attempt to be on top of the results because it has been proven that online searchers click the top results more than the results at the bottom or on other pages of the results. The more people find your site at the top of the search results, the more are the chances of them visiting your site.

In the case of the Goldilocks website, it appears the webmaster or SEO guy successfully used SEO to place the Goldilocks website on top of the search results for the competitor keyword “Red Ribbon.”

However, these results are now valid only in the Google US site. Searching for “Red Ribbon” and “Red Ribbon Bakeshop” in the Google Philippines website does not anymore produce the results.

Was it because Goldilocks used Blackhat SEO — an SEO technique that primarily uses deception and which is disapproved by search engines — and Google has discovered this and has now removed the listing from the Google Philippines database?

Post your own thoughts in the discussion Who did the SEO for Goldilocks?

Topic keywords for this post:

• goldilocks website
• red ribbon bakeshop philippines website