5 SEO Techniques to Avoid

20 June 2009
Did You know that SEO Spam can Harm Your Search Engine Rankings and even Destroy Your Internet Business?

5 Unethical SEO Techniques
By now, you have discovered what SEO spam is and what dangers will be waiting for you if you decide to adopt these shady techniques in your campaigns. Now, it's time to find out what those unethical SEO methods actually are. Here are 5 major SEO spam tactics that are not recommended to use by professional webmasters.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing means using the same keywords in Your META tags or elsewhere in the content over and over again. This technique was recognized by SEs and web sites that use it are being penalized. It simply doesn't work anymore and you shouldn't use this technique too.

Hidden Text and Links

Search engines scan pages for keywords entered into a search query and show results where that keyword appears mostly on a page. Webmaster decided to insert some text or links that can be seen by search engines, but not by human eyes. For example placing white text and links with keywords into a page with a white background color. People couldn't see the difference, but spiders could and ranked those sites higher. It doesn't work anymore.

Doorway Pages

These are usually poor quality pages that are created to rank highly, specifically for one or more chosen keywords. They not benefit visitors, they're created for search engines only. These pages may have exact or similar content that is copied from other sites. Doorway pages usually have no navigation menu, just a link to a main page. They may reside on the same, but mostly on other company's server.

Cloaking

This method is used to deliver different pages for visitors and search engines. Webmasters configured their servers to recognize IP addresses of SE spiders and deliver them content rich, optimized pages, while showing absolutely different pages for human visitors. Cloaking may also redirect visitors to a home page. This technique is treated as spam and is not recommended to use.

Link Farms

Many companies use this method. It's sole purpose to gain link popularity. A link farm is usually one page that consists of 50 to 100 or more links to websites that have nothing in common with the content of your site. Such pages have no benefit to users as they give links to sites that aren't interesting to them. Link farms are being penalized by search engines.