Google and other major search enginesurge you to avoid overly
aggressive SEO practices when you build your site. Google has actually taken the
trouble to spell out SEO practices it regards as naughty (the list can be found
at http://www.google.com/webmasters). You should pay attention to
this list as if it speaks the mind of every major search engine, not just
Google. Google's position that building sites that get highly ranked is simply a
matter of providing useful content isn't totally off-the-wall, although it
assumes a world where everything always works.
According to Google, good search-engine-citizen web sites do
not:
Employ hidden text or links
For example, users cannot read white text on a white background
(and will never even know it is there). But the search engine will still parse
this text. This rule comes down to making sure that the search engine sees the
same thing that users view.
Cloak pages
Also called stealth, this is a technique that involves serving
different pages to the search engine than to the user.
Add redirects in a deceptive
way
It's easy to redirect the user's browser to another page. If
this is done for deceptive purposesfor example, to make a user think they are on
a page associated with a well-known brand when in fact they are on a web
spammer's pageit's frowned upon.
Attempt to improve your PageRank with
dubious schemes
Linking to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the Web may
actually hurt your own PageRank (or search ranking), even if doing so provides
inbound links to your site.
Bad neighborhoods are primarily link farms or link
exchangessites that exist solely for the purpose of boosting a site's inbound
links without other content. Web spammers are sites that disguise themselves
with pseudo descriptions and fake keywordsthe descriptions and keywords do not
truly represent what the site contains.
Practice keyword loading
This is the practice, beloved by SEO "experts," of adding
irrelevant words to pages (the page can then be served as the search result
based on a query for the irrelevant words that actually don't have anything to
do with the page content). Proper keyword usage highlights your legitimate
content but does keyword load.
Create multiple similar
pages
Google frowns on the creation of pages, domains, and subdomains
that duplicate contentalthough obviously there are places to legitimately
duplicate content.
Pages created just for search engines are sometimes called
doorway pages. (The term doorway page covers a variety of techniques that are
used to substitute one page for anothereither by redirection or actual
substitution of pages on the web serverwhen the first page is optimized for
specific keyword searches, and the page to which the user is actually sent has
little or nothing to do with that search.
Pages that lack content
Google frowns pages that lack original content, such as a page
that exists simply to present affiliate links.
