SEO Techniques to Avoid
04/02/09
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 SEO techniques, called "black hat" techniques after old cowboy movies in which the villains wore black hats, are considered unethical because they deceive visiting search engines about the site's real content, and often make pages ugly or unusable for human visitors.
Using unreadable text is a classic black hat SEO technique. Hiding text by making it too small to read, coloring it to match the background, or covering it with an image or a div block are all frowned upon, and excessive use will cause a page to be 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 common black hat SEO technique, one users find even more irritating because the "stuffed" keywords clutter 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 page's topic.
A more sophisticated variant of keyword stuffing is spreading keywords through the page's body text instead of lumping them together in a single block. Search engines scan for this SEO trick by calculating each page's keyword density and penalizing pages whose density falls above a target range. The target range has been falling lower and 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.
Technologically sophisticated webmasters present different content to the search engines than to human viewers, resulting in "doorway pages" that have been optimized to search engines', instead of humans', preferences. Search engines strongly penalize sites that show them doorway pages. Avoiding being penalized for doorway pages is simple: Just don't make one.
If you have been using any of these common SEO techniques, overhaul your pages using good SEO, and keep an eye out for any misapplication of SEO techniques in the future. White hat SEO is easy and, in the long run, less trouble than flashy black hat SEO techniques.
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