Search Marketing Blog
Avoid The Big Six (Practices That Could Get Your Site Banned by the Search Engines)
While there are many online resources available that describe legitimate search engine optimization techniques, I thought it would be valuable to review the six most recognized tactics that will get you banned or penalized by the major search engines.
1. Using Hidden Text
Don’t try to boost your keyword density by adding hidden text or links to your Web site. Often developers think they can outsmart the search engines by adding a large amount of keywords that are the same color as the site’s background to the bottom of their pages. This technique may have worked in 1998. However, search engines today can easily detect hidden text.
2. Building Doorway Pages
Doorway pages typically consist of many paragraphs of meaningless text, featuring large amounts of additional keywords, which direct search engine visitors to other pages on your site. Building pages solely for the search engines is a recognized form of spam, and will most certainly get your site banned.
3. Cloaking Pages
Creating different versions of a specific page (i.e., one version for search engines, and another version for humans) is a sure-fire way to get your site removed from the search engine indexes. This unscrupulous practice typically creates pages that have an enormous amount of keywords, and little relevant content, to the search engines.
4. Keyword Spamming
If a keyword is repeated too often in your copy, and/or featured too many time your code, your site can be penalized, or even banned, by the search engines. Many times perpetrators of this technique will start with decent copy, then attempt to over-populate their target keyword into this copy. A good rule of thumb is to keep your keyword density under 6% of the total number of words on each page.
5. Using Duplicate Content
Creating the exact same content for multiple sites, or using duplicate content on multiple pages of your site, can also get you banned. In addition, stealing content from competitive sites can also lead to being penalized by the search engines.
6. Linking to Unrelated & Unscrupulous Sites
It is in your best interest to stay away from linking to gambling sites, adult-themed sites, link farms, and spammy sites. Make sure that the relevant sites you do link to have significant Page Rank, and are currently indexed by the search engines. Search engines keep track of the links you have established with other sites. Therefore, if you have bicycle touring site for example, it would be detrimental to have your site linked to a shady prescription drug site.
Abiding by search engine best practices better the chances of having your site prominently indexed within the major search engines. Avoiding the “Big Six†unethical search engine practices stated in this post will also greatly contribute to your search marketing efforts.
