Illegal SEO Techniques to Avoid
1. Link Farms
Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.
A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing
gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can
also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.
Such websites are considered illegal in the eyes of Google and
major search engines because they aim to achieve high rankings
for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content
and overall quality.
As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine
is highly dangerous. Even if your website has great content, if
you or your SEO consultant use this technique, your website will
still get penalized or banned because the engines figure that
if you did have good content you wouldn’t resort to such sneaky
tactics designed to trick them.
How to Guard Against It: When an SEO professional tells
you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them
to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer
is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established
websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases
without having to link back to them).
If a professional tells you that they will build you hundreds
or thousands of pages across different domains that will link
to your website, do NOT work with them as this will severely cripple
your website.
Also periodically search your domain name in the major search
engines to see what sites are pointing to you. If you see anything
out of the ordinary, such as websites whose domains are extremely
long or jibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate
words) or pages that are simply long lists of links, approach
your SEO professional about getting your site removed from these
pages and how they appeared there in the first place.
2. Doorway Pages
Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.
Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed solely
for the search engine and oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the
human visitor. These pages often use a redirect script that automatically
points the visitor to another page on the website without the
human visitor ever seeing the doorway page. This is also known
as cloaking and is clearly defined as an illegal practice by Google
and other search engines.
The only time a landing page is acceptable by search engines
is if it is in the form of an informative, well written article
that human visitors read and enjoy, where they are not tricked
into clicking or being redirected to the website’s main pages.
How to Guard Against It: Make sure you understand exactly
what kind of pages are being added to your website and be sure
to look at most of them. Ask your SEO professional point-blank
whether any of these pages will automatically redirect to your
website’s main page. If they say yes, then they are breaking the
rules and are well aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT work
with such an individual or company.
It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or
other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is
never the case and though Google may not know about that particular
trick yet, it will find out fast enough and your site will get
penalized as a result.
3. Keyword Stuffing
Also known as Keyword Spamming.
One of the original illegal SEO techniques, keyword stuffing
occurs when you load a webpage full of particular keywords, either
in the meta tags, other script tags, or in the content itself.
This is different from optimizing the page for particular keywords
because the same words are being repeated dozens or hundreds of
times in no credible or informative way.
Keywords are hidden several ways, for instance some people will
make the text the same color as the background so search engines
see it, but no human visitors can. Others will hide keywords in
script tags. Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords
outside of your visible screen area, again so that no human visitors
can see it - but search engines can.
Though on the surface, using such techniques might sound like
an attractive idea. However, search engines can detect whether
a keyword is being used properly and will penalize or ban your
site for using any of the above techniques to stuff keywords into
your site.
How to Guard Against It: Oftentimes, the only way you
can know if your site has been stuffed with keywords is to view
the source code of your website (visit your site in your favorite
browser, click “View” and then “Source Code.”) A page of HTML
will display. If you see the same keywords repeated hundreds of
times anywhere, then your page has been stuffed and will be considered
in violation of every search engine’s rules.
4. Scraper Pages or Auto-Generated Pages
Scraper pages are those comprised of search results or content
automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search
engine results. This is a form of plagiarism as no part of the
scraper page is original content. Most often, such sites are used
to display Google Adsense Ads or other ads that pay the site owner
every time a visitor clicks on it. However search engines have
gotten very good at banning such sites from their results and
human visitors can detect them easily as well.
Scraper sites are easy to spot as they are largely illogical.
They are snippets of other webpage content, or search results,
and therefore have no sensible point and do not make sense when
read.
How to Guard Against It: As with other illegal techniques,
it’s important to first ask your SEO professional directly whether
they will employ such unethical techniques. Then you must monitor
their work. Make sure you have access to your website’s hosting
service so that you can view all pages that are hosted on your
site’s domain. Periodically view pages at random to be sure they
do not contain this or other illegal content. Also get reports
of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you rank for.
Click through from the search results and check the landing page’s
source code and content for anything fishy or inappropriate.
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