Don't Use Tricks -SEO Guide Part #2
Welcome to the Second of Many post on series dedicated to Search Engine Optimization By me ! In This Second Post I will warn you about what Tricks Not to Use for SEO .
The search engines are aware of the many sneaky ways that site owners try to achieve undeserved ranks (in SEO lingo, these underhanded activities are called spamming). If they discover that your site is spamming, even if you’re not doing it on purpose, your site may be penalized: your rank may be downgraded, or your page—or even your whole site—could be banned. Even if your site is never caught and punished, it’s very likely, it is inevitable, that your tricky technique will eventually stop working. Here are some practices that have been on the search engines’ no-no list for so long that they can safely be labeled as “Eternally Bad for your Site”:
Cloaking
When a search engine robot visits your site, it expects to see the same content that any normal human visitor would see. Cloaking is a method of identifying robots when they visit your site and showing them pages that contain substantially different content from what human visitors see. This thwarts the search engines in their attempt to deliver the most accurate search results to their users. In the vast universe of website technology, there are sometimes valid reasons for showing different content to different entities. Tricking the search engines to give you higher ranks than you deserve is not one of them.
Duplicate Content
Are you the kind of person who thinks, “If one aspirin works, why not take two?” If so, you might be thinking that if one paragraph of keyword-rich text will help your ranks, why not put it on every page in your site? Or worse, if one website brings you sales, why not make a bunch of identical websites with different names and get even more sales? The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of the search engine results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher. If search engines notice a lot of duplicate content on your site, they may remove a portion of your site’s pages from their index, and they may not visit your site as frequently.
Machine-Generated Text
I have all seen pages that vaguely resemble the English language but are actually a computer-generated cacophony that reads a bit like a surrealist’s bad dream. And the reason I have seen these pages is because they sometimes rank in search engine results. But you can be sure that domains containing content like this don’t stick around in the ranks for long. The search engines are constantly tracking them down and weeding them out. If you care at all about the long-term success of your website, steer clear of auto-generated text.
Keyword Stuffing
Adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy. I am not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry. I am talking about repeating the same word or words over and over again so that your page looks like an industry-specific grocery list. At best, sites that do this cause eyestrain for their visitors. At worst, they’re risking penalties from the search engines.
Invisible Text
Invisible text means specific elements that are included within specific parameters in your site’s code and recognized by the search engines to be legitimate. It does not means making a ton of keywords Invisible by making them the same color as the background. The search engines caught on to this one a long time ago, and they’re not likely to let you get away with it.
Participating in Link Schemes
Have you been tempted to buy into a service that promises you a plethora of high-quality links for just a few hundred bucks? Don’t! While you may not be avid readers of the search engines’ quality guidelines or webmaster blogs, I am , This is my job and they’ve been saying it clearly for years: Participation in pay-for-links schemes will not help your site’s ranks and may even be harmful to your ranks if detected by the search engines.
