Atlanta Small Business Marketing Consulting

Illegal SEO Techniques to Avoid

1. Link Farms

Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.

What is a link farm? Simply this... A link farm is a series of websites that are created solely for housing links that point to a collection of websites. It is often a network of websites that interlink with each other.

How doed Google view Linkfarms?

Google & the main search engines consider link farms illegal because they aim to achieve high rankings for websites that haven’t really earned those rankings through time, original content and good quality.

Using link farms, or spamdexing a search engine like google as a strategy is very dangerous and we would never recommend it.

Here is the catch, even if your website has absolutely fantastic content... if you or your SEO companystoop to use this technique, your website will still get penalized or even worse banned. Why is that? Believe it or not, the engines count on this fact that if you really did have good content you would never resort to such under handed 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 plan on doing so. What you want to hear 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. In other words one way links without a reciprocal link required).

If a SEO organization 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

What is a door way page? They are known also as advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.

Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that is designed only for a search engine and many times it is not even viewable to the human eye. In other words it is invisible page that you are not meant to see.

What is the purpose of a doorway page?

A gateway page uses 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. Google as specifically defined such door way phrases as an illegal practice by Google!

So then what kind of landing pages are allowable by Google? The only landing page is approved by search engines is if it is an informative, well written article that human visitors (not just spyders) can read & benefit from, where they are not tricked into clicking or being redirected to the website’s main pages.

How to Guard Against It: As the owner of a business you need to be 100% informed as to exactly what kind of pages are being added to your website and then... here is the kicker, be sure to look at most of them. Ask your SEO consultantl 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 that you do NOT work with such an individual or company. Keep on searching for a SEO company to work with.

Beware of the following response to your question:

It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special javascript or other redirect that is “legal” or acceptable to Google. This is untrue, and while Google may not know about this specific trick yet, it will eventually & your site will get penalized guaranteed.

3. Keyword Stuffing

What is keyword stuffing? Perhaps you have also heard of the phrase known as Keyword Spamming.

This is one of the dinasaur tricks of the unethical SEO trade. Keyword stuffing happens 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 over and over again in an uninformative way. Believe it or not sometimes they may appear dozens or even hundreds of times.

Such SEO practices can get pretty darn sneaky. They will often hide Keywords in hidden several ways. For example some SEO gurus will make the text the same color as the background so search engines see it, but it remains invisible to the human eyes. Others will hide keywords in script tags. Still others yet will use CSS to position keywords outside of your visible screen area, with the idea that you and I can't see it - but search engines can.

Though on the surface, using such techniques might sound like a good idea at first, remember, search engines can tell 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 . If you want to do this all you need to do is to go to your sitelater , click “View” and then “Source Code.” You will then see a page of HTML coding. 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. Believe us when we say that this is hurting your business.

4. Scraper Pages or Auto-Generated Pages

What exactly is a scraper page? Scraper pages are those made up of search engine results or content automatically pulled from dozens or hundreds of websites or search engines. This is down right plagiarism as no part of the scraper page is original content, nor does the original author get credit. Usually these types of sites are used to display Google Adsense Ads that pay the site owner every time a visitor clicks on it. Be assured that the search engines are now on the warpath to ban such sites from their search results.

Scraper sites are very easy to spot as they are usually do not make much sense. The reason for this is that they are simply snippets of other webpage from here and there, and so do not make sense when you read them.

How to Guard Against It: As with other illegal techniques discussed so far, it’s imperitive to first ask your SEO team outright if they use such unethical techniques. Then you must monitor their work on a continual basis. One way to do this is to have access to your own website’s hosting service so that you can view all pages that are hosted on your site’s domain. Then every now and then view pages at random to be sure they do not contain this or other illegal content. It's also a good idea to get reports of your site’s rankings and search the keywords you rank for. What you want to do is then click through from the search results and check the landing page’s source code and content for anything that just doesn'y look right to you.

Read Googles SEO guidelines for selecting an SEO company .

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