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Risking Your Web Presence With Unethical SEO Techniques
Search engine spamming substantially increases the possibility that a website will appear at the top of the search results for a certain keyword. Companies that use unethical SEO marketing strategies to improve their search engine positions get penalised sooner or later.
There are five major SEO spam tactics(Or Black Hat SEO) that are not adviced to use by professional webmasters.
- Keyword Stuffing
- Hidden Text and Links
- Doorway Pages
- Cloaking
- Link Farms
What is Keyword Stuffing?
One of malpractice used by some seo guys to quickly get results is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is simply the process of repeating the same keyword or keyphrases over and over in a page. Like, stuffing site with keywords in META tags, comments, images and all over the website content to trick search engines is a short term gain. One of the highly unethical SEO technique is adding hidden links or any text that is only readable by search engines. E.g. white texts with keywords, on a webpage with a white background.
Mirror Web pages
It’s a technique where several sites that share similar content but with different URLs are linked to one another. Similarly some SEO companies create doorway web pages which are low on standard and made to rank high for some keywords. They do not affect website visitors and are designed for search engines.
URL Cloaking
URL cloaking shows a variety of web pages for search engines and visitors. Webmasters construct their servers so that they can identify IP addresses of the search engine spiders then provide them with content rich and optimized pages, at the same time displaying search engine bots one thing and humans another. URL cloaking can also redirect a visitor to their home page.
The top three ways to cloak:
- All Inclusive 301 Redirect: The most common form of link cloaking is a simple 301 redirect. Both bots and humans who click on a link from Site A to Site B are forwarded onto Site C through a 301 redirect. The link juice and anchor text are attributed to Site C while the link itself does not show up in a back-link search for Site C.
- Bot Redirect: In Bot Redirection , the search engine bots get 301 redirected to Site C while normal web surfers are given the actual content on Site B. This helps create trust with web surfers as they see what they are expecting when clicking on the link from Site A.
- User Redirect: This is considered more of a traditional cloaking setup. In this case web surfers clicking on the link from Site A to Site B are 301 redirected to Site C while the search bots are given the actual content on Site B. We see this technique used by many black-hats building massive machine generated content networks. In most cases, this type of setup defeats the purpose of link cloaking as nothing is hidden from back-link checks or web surfers.
Link Farms
Link farms are sites that link to other with the sole intent of boosting link popularity. Link farms and FFA pages are used to gain ranks and should be avoided. They are one page websites made up of one hundred or more links to different categorized websites having no similarity with your website’s content.
SEO spam can bring you high ranks for chosen keywords. However such effects are usually temporary. You may enjoy your top position for a couple of days, weeks or even months, but as soon as search engines detect that you’re using illegal SEO techniques, they will ban your site from their index for a long time.
