Search Engine techniques that won't improve search engine rankings
Introduction to search engine ranking Penalties
Black hat Search engine optimization is the deliberate technique of fooling the search engines into giving a website a higher search engine ranking than it would otherwise deserve.
Every webmaster wants to improve search engine rankings in the major search engines. For years, there have been many tricks developed to cheat the search engines. It is important to understand what techniques are considered unethical by the search engines. If you are caught breaking the rules intentionally or otherwise, your site could be banned from a search engines. or at the very least you could incur a search engine ranking penalty.
Each search engine's objective is to produce the most relevant results for any particular search query. Every search engine measures relevancy according to its own algorithm. Each search engine also has a slightly different interpretation of what is considered spam. In the past these spamming tricks did work, however, they no longer work today as the software designers have implemented programs that seek out these sites.
Poor SEO Techniques to attempt to improve search engine rankings
Search Engine, Meta techniques:
In order to fool the search engines in order to improve search engine rankings, for nonresident search queries, the Meta Keyword tags are stuffed keyword phrases totally unrelated to the sites content. The supposed objective is to trick people surfing the web into visiting their site when they otherwise wouldn't. This trick is from the early 90's and simply doesn't work.
Invisible text
By using fonts that are the same color as the background the designer hides keywords on the page that can only be seen by the search engines. The objective sought is to artificially increase the keyword density of the page or to have the page come up for an unrelated search query. This blatant form of spam could get you banned from the search engines.
Keyword stuffing
Another very popular search engine spam trick, similar to invisible text has been the addition of extensive keywords on the bottom of the page in very small fonts. This use of keywords is usually no more subtle than paragraphs consisting of nothing more than the simple repetition of one or two keyword phrases. Stuffing and excessive keyword density of any form will reduce a page ranking in most search engines.
Hidden tags
The use of keywords in hidden HTML tags like title tags, comment tags, Meta description tags, style tags, http-equiv tags, hidden value tags, alt tags, font tags, author tags, option tags,etc. Excessive keywords in these tags, can also be considered to be spam by some search engines. The general guideline to follow is to practice moderation, and ensure that your tags actually relate to the sites content. Many search engines now ignore most of these tags so this spammy technique will not improve search engine rankings.
Duplicate pages
Identical copies of a web page are considered as search engine spam by all search engines and directories. It is not advisable to simply give copies of a page a different file name, and submit multiple copies of the same page.
Bait & switch
Bait and switch techniques involve designing a site to rank high on the search engine then uploading a substitute page in its position. This will not guarantee a long lasting search engine position, as the page will be revaluated by the crawler based engines on a periodic basis and will lose its spot anyway's.
Search Engine Page redirects
Redirecting is defined as taking a searcher from a page designed for a specific search query to a totally unrelated page. Most search engines do not like pages whose sole purpose is to that take the user to another page not related to the original query.
Using Page Cloaking
Cloaking is a technique to design pages specifically for the search engines alone and not intended to be seen by normal web surfers. Web sites are penalized if it is found that they identify a search engine spider by IP name or address for the purpose of providing a page specifically designed for the engine alone. If a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking, it will probably ban the site from their index.
Linking search engine penalties
Search Engine Link popularity
Link popularity is becoming an increasingly significant factor the major search engines use in determining page rank. Search engine spammer's have developed techniques aimed at artificially increasing the link popularity of a web site in order to influence its ranking in the search engines. Numerous legitimate inbound links will not be considered spam, however the following techniques are considered link spamming and are likely to get you a search engine penalty or even banned from an important search engine.
Poor Search Engine Linking
Joining link farms has become a popular method some designers have adopted in an attempt to artificially improve the link popularity of their web sites. A link farm is a network of web pages which are extensively cross-linked with each other. When a web site joins such a link farms, it gets a link from each of these pages, and also links back to each of those pages. However, these are low quality inbound links and many search engines can also detect theses link farms very easily.
Message boards
Some designers post their own link to hundreds of message boards in an attempt increase the volume of backlinks to their site. However, this practice relies on the myth that it is the shear volume of inbound links that determines a sites popularity.
This is not very effective technique as the search engine software is able to determine the quality and relevance of each inbound link. As these message boards will have hundreds of unrelated links, backlinks from these sights will have very little significance.
Paying for Linking has recently become frowned upon by major search engines like Google and should therefore be avoided. Links that are favoured are natural links that are obtained through hard work and quality content.
A few high quality links from content related site will be given much higher weight. A quality link means that the page where the originating backlink comes from must have similar context (keywords and density) as your site.
Over submitting to the Search Engines
Individual search engines have their own definition of what is considered over submitting. Submitting the same page more than once a month to the same search engine and submitting too many pages each day can be considered spamming. Different pages from the same site can be submitted on the same day, but there are also limits. Remember you only really need to submit your main page and the indexing systems will spider through your links to discover your secondary pages.
Penalties from search engines
Unfortunately, not all search engines are exactly clear about what is considered spam or how they will penalize you if they consider your page utilizes spamming techniques. Penalties will range from a demotion in site ranking,(rumoured to be -30 search engine ranking drop for Google), banning a specific page or in extreme and obvious cases of spamming they will completely ban your site from their engine. Some engines even have a lifetime banning policy on aggressive spammer's.
In the past, search engine spamming generally cluttered the web with meaningless results. Therefore, one should use caution when examining the source code on competitors highly ranked pages to reverse engineer your own site. Some older high ranking pages actually got there by use of some of the spamming techniques mentioned above and if these same pages were submitted today, they may have been banned. It is important to evaluate several sites to ensure that you are not getting ideas from an older site.
With the consolidation of the search engines that has taken place, a ban from one of the largest engines like Google or Yahoo would significantly harm your internet presence. Spam is easily detected by directories and automated search engines as well, in fact Google even has a page dedicated to reporting sites which cheat. This is like a neighborhood watch program to catch search engine bad guys.
