In the world of SEO, it certainly is beneficial to know what you’re doing, but it’s especially important to know what you should never, ever do. There are SEO techniques employed by people who only seek short-term investment returns and results, so if you’re planning on working on your site for prolonged periods of time, yet are also having plans of using any of these methods, then think again, because this can easily bury you. The common collective for these practices is Black Hat SEO. Everything Black Hat is bad because it does not comply with the search engines’ requirements, which means that if you get caught, then that’s it – you will be surely penalized. The problem with all of this is that you need to be familiar with the practices in order to avoid them. For people newer to the field, it might seem like good idea to use some of them, but this will cause their sites to disappear from the search results altogether. Search engines don’t care whether you know what these practices are or not – if you use them, you will burn. But don’t worry, I’m here to familiarize you with of these techniques so you don’t use them, effectively saving you a huge penalty.
Techniques
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Let’s jump directly on the techniques, shall we? The first one I want to talk to you about is spinning articles. Spinning articles means providing the same content over and over and over, but using different words, or in order words, paraphrasing texts you’ve already provided to the readers of your site, or giving them the same topic in a different package (as you can see, it get annoying after a while). This may sound like a good idea, because it’s technically not duplicating. However, what you should know about search engines is that their job is to provide relevant content, and even though yours isn’t duplicated, it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, so it won’t be at all well received. Search algorithms have evolved beyond the point that they can be fooled so easily. It’s better to find something new to talk about, than providing the same recycled content.
Concealing content, for the lack of a better word, is another grotesque technique people use to fool crawlers. It is essentially hiding a portion of the text (for optimization purposes) by making it the same color as the page background, for example. This is way the viewer doesn’t really know about it, but the bots still detect it. This is a cheap trick, but it used to work well, until bots started to catch up with the method, making it obsolete. Now it’s easy to get caught and get penalized.
Keyword stuffing is, by far, the worst way you can go about a text. It will make the content nonsensical, and it will be detected by the spiders so you will get a penalty. It may work for a while and grant you a good position in the search engines, but when you get caught, there will be no more shortcuts.
Consider this
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You need to understand that search engines aren’t the villains who want to stop your from expanding your business, here. Far from it. But they have a business of their own, and that business means that they are to provide relevant content to people who use them. When you take shortcuts and try to make a lower quality site seem more prestigious, you are effectively standing in their way- they don’t provide relevant content because of you. And they won’t have it! SEO isn’t bad, as long as you provide interesting and relevant, organic content and comply with their terms.
Author Bio: Morgan Johnes is passionate freelance blogger and writer. He is keen on SEO and Internet. He currently works as a manager of http://www.qualitycleaninglondon.co.uk/cleaning-services-se21-dulwich/ and he has a lot of experience to share.