6 SEO Techniques That Will Get Your Website Banned

Has your website ever been banned for spamming the internet or using unethical techniques? If you are in charge of the search engine optimization (SEO) for your website this is, more often than not, the result of inexperience and a lack of knowledge about what is and is not acceptable in terms of optimization. If you have hired an SEO company to undertake optimization for you, on the other hand, they have been sprung using black hat techniques and you should really consider taking your business elsewhere.

• Keyword Stuffing: The search engines look at something known as ‘keyword density’, which calculates how many times a keyword is used on a particular page. Shove your keywords in too many times and the search engines will think you’re spamming them.
• Cloaking: This is a phrase used to describe a website that shows one lot of information to search engines and another to human visitors. This is often seen as a misleading SEO technique, but there are situations in which it can be used without penalty.
• Hidden Text: Whilst this was once a popular SEO technique for adding in keywords, the act of hiding text in the background (by making the font the same colour), using negative margins or placing it somewhere else invisible is considered highly unethical.
• Gateway Pages: Some people like to create web pages or entire websites for the sole purpose of ranking highly and sending traffic onto the main site. If these gateway pages don’t provide users with any SEO value, however, they can be banned.
• URL Redirection: This happens when a user or search engine is redirected to another website without their knowledge. Some SEO’s use this technique to acquire the Page Rank of the destination page, whilst others are trying to send you to dodgy websites.
• Link Farms: This is an SEO technique that is almost as old as the term itself. Some people try to trick the system by creating a community of websites that all link to each other; they try to take advantage of the fact that link popularity is a major factor in ranking.

Fortunately, the search engines have become increasingly smarter when it comes to rooting out those websites that are utilizing black hat and unethical SEO techniques. Whilst these techniques might give your website some pretty good results to begin with, you can rest assured that it will only be a day or two until the search engines realize what you are doing and land you with a hefty penalty or even a ban. There are plenty of other SEO techniques out there that you would be better off using.