Search Engine Optimisation Resources

Dont Do This

There are many things one can do through either ignorance or intent that can actually harm your rankings with the search engines. Whilst some of these techniques can be OK in certain circumstances, we list them anyway as they can be trouble in an amateurs hands. A good rule of thumb is, if in doubt dont do it!

These include (in no special order):

Cloaking Having one page show to the search engine spiders and a different one for visitors. This trick usually involves creating doorway domains/pages that are keyword stuffed that redirect to the target sites "pretty" pages.
Hidden Text Using text that is the same colour as the page background, usually to hide keyword stuffing
Negative XY Positioning Using these negative values it is possible to position large blocks of (spammy) text off the visible page but allowing them to be spidered by the search engine robots
Invisible Links Using same coloured text as above or same coloured single pixel links to allow spidering of heavily optimised pages that the bots will follow but visitors wont
Alt text stuffing Using hidden single pixel pictures to massively increase the incidence of keyphrases in the alt text descriptions
Meta "refresh" & Javascript redirects One of the most common tricks used today. A page (or site) is constructed with very high keyword density and code is added that redirects the user from the high scoring page to another more acceptable page or site

The problem with the above and many other tricks is that, although they may work for a while, eventually they get found out and lead to penalisation, or even a ban.

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