Get Into The Good Books of Google – Bad SEO Tactics You Should Avoid

There are tons of articles on SEO buzzing around the internet that tell you different techniques of optimization, best practices, seo tactics etc. True that they are not all reliable pieces of information unless you know you obtained them from authoritative websites.
To make all this effort of SEO worthy, one must not forget the basic requirement of a website to make itself eligible for entry into search indices. To break this out into simple words, there are certain ‘dirty’ tips and tricks or black hat SEO renowned in the SEO world that will get your website sprayed out of Google’s index, no matter how hard you try on other white hat techniques.
So here are some of the most commonly practised bad techniques you must totally refrain from if you must make your entry into the good books of Google.

1. Cloaking

Cloaking is a practice meant to deceive the search engines by designing a website to present different content to the users and search engines. This is usually done by means of redirects or programming. Cloaking is a quick way to get your website trashed out from Google’s index.

2. Linking Scheme

People engage in all sorts of linking schemes as ‘links’ is what count for ultimately, when it comes to search engine listings. Reciprocal linking is commonly practiced for it is the easiest – you are linked to from a website and you return the link, or vice versa. There are website networks that are dedicated to providing such linking services, both paid and unpaid, and some of which are labeled as spamming websites. It’s important to remember that building quality relevant links is all that matters, and just any links around will only suffice that purpose and will have no resultant impact on improved search engine rankings. If you are caught to be engaged with such spammy websites through buying or selling links, you stand the imminent risk of Google’s penalization.

3. Keyword Spamming

Writing contextually relevant and informative content on your website is important to both users and search engines. The practice of repeating keywords within the content only to increase its density will not only compromise on quality and user readability, but when caught under the detection of the search engines, will put you in radar. It’s important to incorporate content relevant keywords into your website, but not overdo it to cheat the search engines. Remember that you will not scale up your search ranking by increasing the count of keywords on your website pages. Simply keep your pages relevant, and that will do all the good work with users and search engines alike.

4. Doorway Pages

A doorway page is a keyword stuffed page that redirects after a few seconds, to the actually page the webmaster wants to show. A meta redirect is usually implemented to achieve this. Unlike cloaking, both Google and users see the same page at first, post which the intended page. Doorway pages are poor quality pages that say little in the way of original content. They are a sure-fire way to get your website banned from Google.

5. Duplicate Content

Some webmasters engage in scraping content from other websites to include in theirs, to increase the credibility and volume of website content. Google loves unique content. If you are found to be involved in the practice of ‘stealing’ content, it poses the penalization for duplicate content.

6. Hidden Text

Another method of cunningly getting to deceive the search engine is by providing hidden text on web pages which only the search engines see, and not the users. This is often done by using the same font colour as the background colour. This is another form of keyword stuffing and one of the cheap seo tactics that will get your name into Google’s bad books.
These are some of the commonly used bad techniques that some SEO firms still continue to use. Though they often make statements to justify these, you must make sure your website does not fall into the witches hands.