Search Engines Don’t Like Tricks

This entry was posted on Oct 25 2008

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, i dare say 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”:
1. 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 special, custom-made pages that are different 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.
2. 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 big headache it causes for searchers. If the search engines listed identical content multiple times, it would destroy the diversity of their results, which would destroy their usefulness to the searcher. So if the search engines catch on to duplicate content schemes, they’re likely to knock you down in the ranks.
3. Keyword Stuffing Adding a keyword list to the visible text on your page is not exactly scintillating copy. We’re not talking about overly optimized text, which may come off as pointless and dry. We’re 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.
4. Invisible Text When we mentioned invisible text previously in this chapter, we meant specific elements that are included within specific parameters in your site’s code and recognized by the search engines to be legitimate. We did not mean 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.

credit:

from book : Search engine optimization an hour a day second edition, written by jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin