Bad SEO Practices

Bad SEO practices are generally refered to as “Black Hat” whereas acceptable SEO practices are refered to as “White Hat”.

Getting page views at any cost is not a good tactic. It never works in the long run, even if it may work for a short while. Do not engage any company that recommends or employs any of these techniques.

Here are some sure fired ways to lower your ranking and get the worst search engine results. These are the worst of the worst dirty tricks and they can lower your Google ranking virtually overnight if discovered (which they will sooner or later)or just get you banned.

Cloaking

Designing your Web site so that search engines see one thing and visitors see another.

Having a Robot Write Your Web Site

There are programs out there that duplicate the same content but make a few changes here and there. If Google catches you, and they’re pretty good at catching this, you can kiss your page views goodbye. Some SEO companies use this method to speed up the process of getting your site ranked. It can do quite the opposite.

Duplicate Content

Some SEO companies use spam sites to try and collect page views by duplicating the same content on multiple pages. Google loves original content and not recycled content over and over again.

Adding Keywords that Don’t Relate to Your Content

Meta keywords aren’t that important to Google anymore. However, when you list keywords, do list keywords that directly relate to your site, and don’t repeat the same keyword multiple times. Spamming keywords by listing every word in the dictionary is a great way to have your ranking lowered in Google or your site even banned. Avoid a company that practices this as you are the one that will suffer and not them.

Hidden Text

Some SEO companies try to hide keywords by making the background color the same as the font color. This is called keyword stuffing or fontmatching. Google and other search engines are increasingly sophisticated at catching this, and they’ll likely remove any offending web sites from their search engine index quicker than you can blink an eyelid.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages or Gateway pages are pages that are optimized for one key term but are really designed to be gateways to lead you to different content. For instance the “banana,” “strawberry,” and “apple” gateways might all be designed to get you to go to “fruit punch.”

Link Farming

This practice was very popular some years ago. this involved buying links in bulk to any websites and putting them onto a page on your site. This would increase the amount of backlinks you have to your site thus making it seem more “popular” than it really is. All the search engines are able to pick this sort of thing up so avoid any SEO company that still practices this method. In fact, in February 2011, Google updated its algorithm with an update called “Farmer” which targeted just such sites as link farms. Sites that were dependant on such sites for their linking, lost their rankings, some virtually over night.

There are off course many many more examples of bad SEO practices.

Thank you for visiting.
Andrew Radics