Dangerous SEO techniques

For every valid and useful technique there is to optimised your site for inclusion by Search Engines, there is a dubious technique that may well yield great results in the short term, but breaks the Search Engines Terms and Conditions and my result in your site being downgraded or even banned by Search Engines.

If you engage an SEO service to optimise your site for you, you need to be on the alert for use of these techniques.

Keyword overload/stuffing

Overuse of your chosen keywords is one of the hardest areas to judge. You should use your keywords and lots of them, but beyond a certain point the benefit is lost and stray a little further along that road and your site can be regarded as spamming the keywords. Some sites are very blatant on this score and pages are loaded with text not intended to be read by the human audience at all.

Hidden Keywords

There are numerous ways of hiding text on a page, so that the words can only be seen by the Search Engines. The most basic of these "white on white" text is an old and easily detected trick that will certainly get your ratings slapped down. But sadly it is probably the case that you can easily stay ahead in this particular con trick. Search Engine Spiders are only so clever, no engine is currently thought to read CSS Cascading Style Sheets and no engine can understand images.

Bad Example of hidden text

Above is an deliberately mangled example of using a background image to hide text.

Gateway/Doorway Pages

This is simply another method of keyword stuffing. In this case the pages are never meant to be read by humans at all, but are meant to be picked up by Search Engine Spiders with the idea that when a human visits they will browse to a human part of the websites.

Cloaked Pages

Search Engine Spiders have their own internet addresses and their own distinct names. A skilled web master can easily recognise the identity of a Search Engine Spider and serve up one set of pages to the Spider and one set to human visits, even the pages for each of the Spiders may be varied to optimise for each particular spider.

Link Farms

Pages are frequently ranked according the the quality and quantity of off site links to those pages. By setting up a set of pages on another domain that link back to your own pages, you can make your site look as if many people rate the pages highly.

Mirror Sites

Duplicating the same content across sites increases your chances of being seen. As with all the techniques on this page, you will be penalised if this is picked up by the Search Engines.

Automated Submission/Rank Checking programs

To quote Google:

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

How likely you are to be effected by breaking this rule is hard to tell. But it is worth being a little wary. We would recommend that you try trials of such products to help you understand optimised web page construction, but if possible use test pages that are not on the domain you want Search Engines to find. The worst thing that can happen to your domain is to have it blacklisted.