Search Engine Tactics to Avoid

The difficulty of ranking on the first page tempts a lot of webmasters to
resort to questionable tactics. While some methods work, others are outdated,
and most will get you in trouble with sites like Google. Here are some examples
of tactics to avoid when driving traffic through search engines.

1. Text hiding

In past iterations of search engine algorithms, websites with high concentrations
of specific key words would attract the search engine's attention. The more
densely-packed the key words, the higher the rankings. This tactic just does
not work anymore. Search engines are sophisticated enough to look past this,
and in many cases even penalize those who do. An example of text hiding include
coloring the text the same color as the background.

2. Meta Tags

There was a time when search engines like Excite used a web page's meta tags
to rank a site for the key words contained within them. Today, meta tags
are useless, at least for search engine ranking purposes. Of course, it doesn't
hurt to include them, as some places will use meta tag information to display
information about a website. However, some search engine optimization firms
will charge for including them in the strategy, which is completely unethical
and unnecessary.

3. Free-for-all Link Pages and Link Farms

Google places a little bit of weight on incoming links to a website. In other
words, if a lot of websites link to yours, it must be a popular site, and
therefore deserves a top ranking. As a result, webmasters would place their
links in link farms and other pages that allowed people to add their links
for free in order to benefit from the inbound-link stategy. While this holds
true to some degree, Google's algorithms have become more sophisticated.
Google now checks the type of site that the link came from to see if that
site is a link farm or is an actual, relevant website. Therefore, links from
irrelevant and meaningless sites, such as link farms, will not carry any
value.

4. Cloaking

This method is used by webmasters to serve a version of their website to search
engines for ranking purposes, while another version is served to the actual
web surfer. Cloaking is not an advantageous tactic, especially with Google's
newest algorithms. It can have an ethical, practical use, but beware of the
technique and anyone who charges you to use it. Along the same lines, IP Delivery
is sometimes used to cloak pages. The difference is that IP Delivery cloaks
based on IP address. If the address is known to the search engine, it is served
one version of the page. IP addresses not known are assumed to be regular visitors
and are therefore served another version.

5. Keyword Stuffing

Similar to text hiding, keyword stuffing is the practice of stuffing a page
full of key words that people might use to find the site. The difference is
that the text is not overtly hidden by any special methods. You can see it
on some webpages towards the bottom of the page. Again, it is completely unnecessary
and can even devalue your page in the eyes of the search engines.

6. Leader Pages

These pages serve different versions of the same page depending on the particular
search engine. Each page is specifically optimized and served to one search
engine. This tactic was widely used years ago when a handful of search engines
dominated the web while indexing less than a billion web pages among them.
Now that the internet has grown, major search engines have rendered this tactic
useless, as it is akin to serving the same page multiple times.