2010–04–09 How–Could... unethical SEO techniques get your site banned

You should avoid unethical SEO methods, this will keep your site safe. Sure, some illegal SEO techniques work and your site may appear in top position. But If illegal SEO techniques are detected, your site could be banned from the search engines index for a long time.

Your sites page-rank may be penalized for months or years. This makes it very hard to get your site indexed again. It's very hard to be re-indexed if your caught using illegal SEO techniques.

Are you ready to risk your website and internet business to gain higher in search engine rankings for only a few weeks to months? Best thing to do after being penalized is to buy a new domain and start all over again (not fun).

By knowing what techniques to avoid will help your websites SEO future. Here are a few unethical SEO techniques you should stay away from.

• Link Farms
  This method is used by many companies. Link farms purpose are to gain link popularity. Link farm pages contain about a 100 or more links to websites that have nothing in common with your site. These pages have no benefit to the user as they give links to sites that don't interest them. Search engines penalize link farms in return.

• Keyword Stuffing
  Keyword stuffing is using the same keywords in your META tags or elsewhere in the content over and over. Search engines recognize this technique and will penalize your site. This technique doesn't work and you shouldn't waste your time trying.

• Doorway Pages
  These are poor quality pages that usually rank high for one or a few chosen keywords. They do not benefit visitors and are created only for search engines. These pages usually have no navigation with similar or exact content copied from other sites.

• Cloaking
  Is used to deliver different pages for users and search engines. Web masters set their servers to route the search engine spiders to content heavy pages, wile showing completely different pages to the visitors. Use of this technique is look at as spam and should not be used.

• Hiding Text and Links
  Web masters are able to insert links and text not visible to everyday visitors. One way is simply placing white keywords in text with a white background. People can't see the keywords but the spiders can resulting some pages ranking higher then others. Search engines can read the page for keywords that are in users search query and show results where keyword shows up most often. Search engine crawlers are smarter now and this does not work.