Search engines like Bing™, Google™, and Yahoo!® pride themselves on the accuracy of their information, and they’re focused on ensuring that search results return the most relevant websites. Therefore, it pays to be honest and straightforward when you’re presenting your site to the search engines.
Over the years, several webmasters and optimizers have found ways to artificially boost the positions of websites and to achieve higher search rankings in an unethical manner. This type of search engine optimization is called “black hat SEO.” Search engines will penalize these sites by removing them from the index or banishing them to a low position if bad behavior is discovered. The same rules used to detect black hat SEO tactics, or “spamming,” can sometimes trip up people who are honestly trying to promote a good website. For instance, too much repetition of a keyword on a Web page can be mistaken for “keyword stuffing,” so you want to avoid this practice.
It’s important to learn the difference between good and bad tactics for your website and how to keep your site from being mistaken for an untrustworthy source of information.
Tactics to avoid:
- Stuffing keywords. Try not to use the same keyword on your pages too many times. A good rule of thumb is to read your content out loud to see if it sounds repetitive.
- Using hidden text. If you have text on your site that is the same color as the page background, or close to it, then you may get penalized. For instance, dark gray text that’s on a black background and set in a small font size at the bottom of the page would look suspicious. The use of coding tricks to put text outside the average visitor’s view can also lead to problems.
- Buying bad links. One way to inflate search engine rankings is through the use of paid links, and some categories of links serve as a red flag. For instance, if you buy a link that shows up on every page of a 15,000-page website, you might risk a search engine penalty. Search engines are very good at detecting paid text links when they appear on certain parts of a Web page.
- Selling PageRank™. Lots of sites out there make money by selling links for PageRank (or link popularity) purposes. If you get caught, your PageRank will drop to zero, and your site might completely vanish from the search engines.
- Linking to questionable websites. Almost every webmaster has gotten a few dozen requests for a “link exchange.” Sometimes the request offers a link from a third-party site in exchange for your link to a different site. Remember that a link from your site counts as an endorsement, and if a search engine thinks you’re endorsing questionable sites, your rankings will suffer. A link to a gambling, adult-oriented, or offshore pharmaceutical site is usually a bad idea.
- Duplicating content. The content on your site should be unique. If you copy another site’s content, your pages are highly unlikely to be found anywhere that search engines can see them. Congress enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to protect Internet service providers from liability associated with content provided. The original content owner may file a DMCA request with search engines, and they may ban your site altogether. The use of software that scrapes other sites and creates content is also not recommended, since search engines can detect this tactic.