The five “don’ts” of SEO

Every webmaster wishes to have his site listed as high as possible in web searches and search engines, but not all of them are playing fair in trying to achieve their goal. I am going to list out the most common 5 tricks that you should NOT be doing if you still want your site indexed. Most of these below primarily apply to Google, but can be easily translated in other search engines as well.

1. Cloaking
Cloaking is when you set up your website to display different pages for the search engines than for the real surfers. The adepts of this method are claiming that it’s useful for absolute optimization of the content for search engine crawlers. The people against this method state that it’s an easy way to misrepresent the content, to trick the search engines. If you are interested, more details and different perspectives over cloaking can be found here, here and here.

2. Hiding text
Also called fontmatching, it consists in hiding some text within your pages. For example, if you put text with the same color as your background, the text will not be visible by human readers, but it WILL be visible for search engines. Therefore, it’s misleading.

A common derivation of fontmatching is text stacking, or keyword stuffing. The second consists in putting multiple copies of keywords in a very small font on the page, or putting keywords not relevant to your site in your META tags. Google’s policy for example is something like “You can do anything you want to with your pages, and we can do anything we want to with our index, such as excluding your pages.”

3. Using doorway pages
Doorway pages, or gateway pages, are pages on a website that practically gather links to other websites, also gathering relevant keywords. This kind of pages are rather annoying to the regular user, and search engines often choose to exclude you from their indexes. You may find more information regarding doorway pages here and here.

4. Checking your rank with automatic queries.
Shortly, don’t. You don’t have to check your rank every X seconds. It’s just a waste of time and resources. This is not what the search engine was built for anyway.

5. Linking to bad websites
This is probably one of the most important. You can’t control the reputation of the pages that link to you, but no one forces you to link back to pages that have questionable content. Some of these websites have set up link farms (pages that exist for the sole purpose of gathering links) and search engines demote that.

As you can see, search engines drastically punish those who are trying to improve their rankings in other ways than the accepted ones. We encourage you to help Google fighting this mechanism if you spot any page that doesn’t comply, located in their index. You can send an email to spamreport@google.com or fill out the form here.