The goWholesale Blog

6 SEO tactics to avoid

March 4th, 2008

Any business with a website wants theirs to pop up when people search for their product. Wanting this to happen is one thing, while achieving it is very much another. Success usually comes from diligent and patient SEO efforts but some web owners get a little antsy and decide they want results NOW.

This is not a good idea. If you want immediate results it’s likely you’ll have to ‘trick’ the search engines into thinking your website is the best (which it very well may be) but let me let you in on a little secret….search engines don’t take to kindly to being fooled. The result can be banishment from the search engine which will effectively crush your online dreams.

So here are 6 tactics that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN regard as ’shady’ and will penalize you for using (courtesy MarketingProfs.com ).

1. Link Farms - There’s general consensus that one of the strongest influences on search rankings is the number and quality of inbound links to a Web page. A link farm is a group of Web sites created for the primary purpose of creating a high number of links to a given Web site. These links are not "real" (in terms of signaling the quality of the site they link to), and so they are trying distort search engine results.

2. Automated Content/Duplication - Search engines like content. They particularly like frequently updated content. Unfortunately, creating unique content takes time and energy. To try to trigger search engine spiders to index more pages from a Web site, and do so more frequently, some may try to auto-generate content or scrape Web content from other sites and republish it.

This technique often goes hand in hand with link farms (because if you’re creating thousands of sites, you need some content to put on them in order to get the search engines to index them and for the links to matter).

Google has gotten very good at determining what is "natural" content vs. content that is computer-generated gibberish with no value. As for duplicating content on other Web sites without permission, this is often in violation of copyright laws, and it’s unethical.

3. Keyword Stuffing - This involves over-populating certain portions of a Web page with repeated occurrences of a given keyword in the hopes of influencing search engine results. Search engines caught on to this trick many years ago, yet it remains popular for some reason.

4. Cloaking - This practice involves delivering different Web site content to the search engine spiders than is delivered to human users. The usual motivation for this is to send the search engine crawlers content for ranking on a certain term—but to send different content to real users. It’s pretty easy for the search engines to detect this. If you’re suspected of using cloaking, it’s easy for someone (like a Google employee) to simply visit your Web site as a human and check whether you’re cloaking. This technique, when discovered, is one of the most reliable ways to get a site banned.

5. Hidden Text - This technique "hides" text on the Web page that search spiders will index (for ranking purposes), but is invisible to a human. The simplest example is some variation of white text on a white background.

Based on how sophisticated you want to get, it could be based on something as simple as tags in the HTML, CSS stylings or Javascript that changes the page dynamically. Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point.

6. Doorway/Gateway Pages - This practice is similar to the cloaking technique. Instead of dynamically delivering different content to spiders, a doorway page involves getting a given page (the "doorway page") to rank well in the search engines, but then redirecting human users to a different page. Clearly, this is not in the interests of end-users as they don’t get the content they would have expected.

For more information on the right way to build links please read "Link Building Tips for Beginners "

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