0 the Five Scariest SEO Tricks

Vampires, zombies, witches and ghosts might send a chill down your spine, but what about the most terrifying search engine optimization techniques? Just when you thought you were safe, Master Google is introducing the top five scariest SEO methods that are sure to get your URL banned or blacklisted by Google.


Invisible Text

Including hidden text in the background of your site is an old black hat SEO technique. Invisible text is designed to be unseen by visitors, but detected by Google crawlers. There are many ways to implement this trick, such as making the text the same color as the background and hiding the text by positioning it behind and image. Ali Husayni, SEO expert and founder of Master Google, considers the technique malpractice, adding that “many sites have been penalized for using such SEO methods.”

Keyword Stuffing

Stuffing is bad. And we’re not just talking about the kind you eat with turkey. Also called over-optimization, keyword stuffing is the excessive use of keywords on a Web page. While a few repeats is okay and may even be necessary, overuse is frowned upon and can get you banned from Google. According to Husayni, keyword stuffing can be done in multiple places, like in the title tag, description tag, header tags, image tags and other content rich areas.

Link Farms

Link farms are a completely outdated and potentially dangerous way of link building. A link farm is a group of Web sites that all link back to each other created either by an automated service, or individuals. A site that uses link farms is sure to be detected by Google and penalized. Because some directories act like link farms, Husayni suggests submitting your site to only the most reputable Web directories.

Duplicate Content

If the copy on your Web site is plagiarized from someone else’s page, expect negative consequences. “Google is able to cache who the original owner of the text is and any other site that posts duplicate content will have its rank negatively affected on the search results,” Husayni advised.

Cloaking

Sounds scary, huh? Cloaking actually cloaks content, meaning that the content shown to search engines is different than that displayed by visitors’ browsers. Husayni said that this trick is most often enacted by doorway pages, using JavaScript redirect.