subject: Seo Techniques & Violations [print this page] There are many ways to improve search engine rankings and get your website more popular, but the majority of these methods involve the utilization of search engines such as Google, yahoo, etc... That being said you want to be careful not to catch a red flag (red flags lead to your website being classified as spam) on any of these search engines otherwise your journey of website integration for your website comes to an end. What can be considered a violation? Here are a few things:
- thin or shallow content
Google recently released a new provision for content stating that content lacking any real substance will take a penalty hit. Meaning you need to make sure your website has pages full of content not just empty shells.
- Stuffing
This is fairly easy to understand. Keyword stuffing is one of the most common characteristics of spam. Search engines want you to have keywords you want to be found for on your pages. What they dont want is for you to repeat those keywords hundreds of times to try to get a better hit on their searches, thats how websites get receive harsh penalties and are deemed spam.
- Hiding/Cloaking
Hiding text from a human/user while keeping it on the site for search engine ranking is a highly frowned upon SEO strategy and met with harsh penalties. An example of this is using white font on a white page background to hide a few keywords from users while still gaining the benefits from search engines.
Cloaking is a more sophisticated way of hiding. Cloaking is when you arrange your site to look different depending on whether a search engine or a human is viewing it. This is one of the worst things you can do in the land of SEO. Its deliberately going against the rules and will directly result in being banned from certain search engines, Google and yahoo included.
- Links
Paid links- the buying and selling of links on Google through a third party that isnt Google will result in a penalty. Google has been strict about this pretty much since the beginning. If you want to pay for a link do it through Google. Otherwise risk being declared spam and the declension of your website.
