SEO Tricks That Can Hurt Your Website
View PDF | Print View
by: Joe.Maelstrom
Total views: 137
Word Count: 527
Search engine optimization (SEO) offers many SEO techniques that appeal to inexperienced webmasters and can temporarily bump a web page up in the search results, but which will eventually cause the page to be penalized or blacklisted. These "black hat" SEO techniques, named after old Western movies in which the bad guys wore black hats, are considered unethical because they mislead search engines about a pages true content, and often create a bad user experience.
Using unreadable text is a classic black hat SEO technique. Setting a font size too small for humans to read, coloring text to match or blend with the page background, or hiding it behind a div block or floating image are all considered attempts to trick search engines, and pages that use these methods excessively are penalized. (Search engines do not penalize legitimate uses of unreadable text, such as CSS techniques in which text is hidden until the user rolls over a button or link.) To avoid being penalized for unreadable text, make sure all the text on your pages is large enough to be easily legible, colored to contrast with the background, and not inadvertently hidden by another page element.
Keyword stuffing is another black hat SEO technique, even more annoying to the user because unlike unreadable text, the keywords are usually visible on the page. The webmaster fills the page body and title with keywords, which might or might not be relevant to the page. Sometimes the keyword meta tag is also stuffed with keywords, though this is such an ancient SEO technique that most search engines completely ignore they keyword meta tag. To avoid a penalty for keyword stuffing, use good SEO to write natural sounding titles for your pages, and do not add any text to a page that does not apply to the pages topic.
More sophisticated webmasters spread out the keywords within the body of the text instead of piling them in a single paragraph. Search engines filter out pages that use this SEO trick by giving preference to pages with a certain keyword density, and penalizing pages whose keyword density is higher. Because of the eternal nature of spammers, the target density has been sliding ever lower for the past several years. To avoid being penalized for having too high a keyword density, read webmaster forums to keep track of the current desirable density, and rework your pages when their keyword density is too high.
Webmasters with a little more technical skill use "doorway pages" to show specially optimized pages to search engines, instead of showing them the less optimized pages that human viewers see. Search engines strongly penalize sites that show them doorway pages. Avoiding being penalized for doorway pages is simple: Just dont make one.
If you find that you have accidentally used one of these black hat SEO techniques, use good SEO to remedy the mistake, and watch for any inadvertent misuse of SEO techniques in the future. White hat SEO is easy and, in the long run, less trouble than flashy black hat SEO techniques.
About the Author
Find more information on affordable seo, visit hubshout.com/?Do-outbound-links-hurt-your-SERP?&AID=137.
Rating: Not yet rated