Updated: October 23, 2012
Being penalized by the search engines for any tactics they deem against their guidelines can have dramatic consequences for not only your website’s position in Google, but your business’ bottom line as well. Each time Google releases a big update, it’s not hard to find stories about sites/businesses losing revenues and laying off staff.
The so called “black hat” SEO tactics detailed below clearly violate search engines’ published guidelines. We hope that discussing tricks search engines find objectionable will help you recognize, and thus, avoid them.
Knowing these tactics will also help you recognize when a competitor is using them. While it may be tempting to copy them, you should definitely refrain from doing so. Eventually, they will be penalized and you will be rewarded by taking their spot.
In order to have a sustainable SEO strategy, you should avoid the following tactics at all costs. Continue reading for the first 5…check back with us later in the week for the remaining 5 tricks you should avoid.
1. Keyword stuffing
Literally repeating the same keyword over and over again is one of the oldest, easily recognizable black hat tactics. Search engines absolutely hate keyword stuffing and can recognize it pretty easily.
One common keyword stuffing tactic is the <h6> tag, which makes text so tiny that humans can’t see it but search engines can. Many a webmaster has simply placed this code near the bottom of a page. Another tag, <font size = “0”> is another way to stuff keywords without people noticing. Other places where webmasters have been known to stuff keywords include meta description, title tags and image ALT tags.
While these methods can sometimes yield short-term benefits, they rarely work for the long-term. Search engines can be tricked, but they eventually catch on.
2. Text that’s invisible or semi-visible
As a search engine optimization company, one of the paradox’s we deal with is making a webpage that appeals to both search engines AND humans. While search engines award high rankings to pages with lots of copy, people typically respond to pages with special effects and other design elements that search engines can’t easily crawl.
Invisible text is one method that’s been used in the past to deal with this dilemma.
For example, many webmasters and SEO pros would set the text color the same as the background color, which effectively blends the copy with the background color of the page, which makes it invisible to people but visible to search engines. Semi-visible copy (i.e. gray copy on a white background) was being used once search engines became able to detect invisible text.
The easiest way to see if a competitor is using one of these tricks is to use Ctrl+a to select all, which will highlight all of the text on a web page.
While this may sound like a good trick, think again. Hidden or semi-visible text is one of the easiest ways to get your entire site kicked out of the search engines altogether. You in fact run a high risk of being penalized or banned anytime you show different content to search engines than what’s visible to your human visitors.
3. Using CSS to Hide Text
CSS, or cascading style sheets, is another way to hide text from human visitors while making it visible and indexable to search engines. Here’s an example:
Akin to keyword stuffing, this method will render this text invisible to a human visitor while making it completely visible to search engines. Using the “Ctrl+a” method we detailed in #2 will not make the text visible. To see if a competitor is using this method, you will need to view the page’s source code.
Even though this method isn’t quite as risky as the invisible/semi-visible method, you still run the risk of being picked up by a manual review, which is why we urge webmasters to avoid it.
One method that is acceptable is when you give the visitor the ability to unhide the text. A good example of this in practice is CSS tabs that let you tab hidden and unhidden text. For example, you may come across product descriptions that have separate tabs for [Description], [Specifications], [Comments] and others.
4. Selling Links
Many site owners sell links on their sites in order to increase the target URL’s PageRank. Your first warning for scrubbing PageRank or not using a rel=”nofollow” attribute will be your PageRank being dropped to zero. Considered a “shot across the bow” from Google, this won’t immediately result in lost rankings. But if you fail to address the issue in a timely manner, you could be dropped from the search engines altogether.
Paid links often look unnatural. For example, if we included links on SEO-e for a cheap travel site or a travel agency, they would look totally out of place to both the search engines and our visitors.
Being infected by Malware or being hacked is another way selling links puts your website at risk. If you have your site setup in Google’s Webmaster toolbox, they will warn you if they detect your site is being hacked or hosting Malware.
5. Hiding Links
The purpose of hiding links is to give link juice, or PageRank, to favored web pages. These strategically placed links will direct the spider to an off-topic site the webmaster is wanting to index or rank well in the search results. Like hidden text, these links are only visible to the search engines, not your site’s visitors. Since they have no value to the site visitor, search engines absolutely hate them.
You can also make links “semi-visible” – like having the link embedded in a period at the end of a sentence.
While technically “visible,” you run the risk of being penalized since you’re showing something different to search engines than you are to real human visitors.
These are some of the most common tricks we come across on websites. If we spot them on a site we’re working on, we immediately fix them so the site doesn’t get penalized any further, or worse, delisted from the search engines altogether.
As we said above, check back later in the week for the other 5 SEO tricks you should avoid at all costs.
Have you been penalized because you used one or more of these tactics?
If so, how did you address the issue? How long did it take for you to regain the lost ground?