Bad SEO Tactics and Common Mistakes

Saturday, 09 January 2010

Once upon a time, search engine optimization (SEO), was like the Wild West - no rules, and people could do pretty much anything to get their websites up to the top of the search engine listings.  Those days have long gone, however, and the rule of law prevails.  Search engines know all the tricks, and are not slow to penalize any website that attempts to use them.  In this article, we'll look at the things you should definitely avoid if you're trying to optimize your site for web searches.

Duplicate Content

Copying content from another site and placing it on your site is a definite no-no.  Not only is this bad SEO practice, it's copyright infringement too.  You could find yourself in trouble with the law, as well as in trouble with the search engines.  Be aware that other sites might duplicate your content, so if you suspect this has happened and that your  rankings have suffered as a result, contact the search engine immediately.

Cloaking

This is a way of directing visitors to a different website, by disguising or cloaking the information that appears in the address bar.  Search engines have bots that will detect this very easily - but you can't detect them, since they're unnamed and come from undisclosed IP addresses.  Cloaking is a very quick way to get your site banned.

Invisible Keywords

This is the practice of stuffing apparently blank space on a website with keywords, written in the same color as the background so that you can't see them.  You might also find keywords written in a very tiny font at the foot of a web page.  Again, this is something that search engines can easily detect, and it usually results in a ban.

Javascript Manipulation

Overusing javascript is a very poor SEO tactic.  Although search engine crawlers can't read javascript at the present time, if there's too much of it on your site, it will set alarm bells ringing and the search engine will start to look for evidence of other banned practices.  Although you can't avoid using javascript to a certain extent, use as little of it as you possibly can, and keep it in separate file from the main site.

In the end, you can't fool the search engines in the long term, so why waste your energy?  If you can devote all the time and ingenuity that you've put into sneaky SEO tactics into making your site user friendly, content rich and legitimately optimized for keywords, your site will naturally climb up the rankings and you'll never have to worry about being banned.