BlackHat SEO Techniques – 6 Ways to ban your website from Search Engines

by Michael Craig on 13/11/09 at 4:14 pm

There is always the temptation to achieve higher search engine rankings by taking shortcuts. The fact is, Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process and only organic techniques should be used. Using anything other than organic techniques will work for a little while, but there’s a very good chance your perceived success will be short-lived and your website will disappear from the pages of search engines.

The Top 6 SEO Techniques to Avoid

1. Hanging out with the wrong crowd

Search Engines rely a lot on reputation. Websites with higher credibility increase the page rank of offsite links. Bad apples tend to be found together, and for that reason Search Engines will deem illegal or black hat sites less credible which can affect your rankings.

2. Keyword Stuffing

Including a long list of keywords in the copy of your website is not a good idea, and Google knows you are trying to influence the sites rankings. The best way to place keywords on your website is to include your keywords in relevant content. The site copy should be easy to read and feel natural, so be careful to ensure your websites text is still friendly enough for your visitors.

3. Invisible Text

Website owners don’t always place invisible content on the website on purpose. This can be done by having the text color batch the same color as the background, or using css styling to position the content out of page view. Invisible text is very dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

4. Cloaking

Cloaking is the process of curtailing your website to Search Engine Spiders by recognizing the spider’s UserAgent or IP Address. With a cloaked page, the Search Engine robot is served different website content than the website visitor.

Some websites use cloaking to allow search engines to access premium content while not being logged in. Generally, to be penalized the cloaking has to be a deceptive black hat technique.

5. Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are HTML pages optimized for a specific number of keywords or content. Similar to Cloaking the Doorway pages are served only to the search engine, and the website visitor is forwarded to the “real” website.

6. Link Farms

The Google PageRank algorithm places emphasis on the number of incoming website links from other websites. To achieve a higher PageRank BlackHat SEO Companies will place your website in a “link farm” and takes advantage of the PageRank algorithm.

Gaming the system used to be easy, not only does it provide a degraded search experience for web users, but it also comes with real consequences. When performing Search Engine Optimization on your website, it’s important to use only organic SEO techniques.