Search engine optimisation (SEO) has become a major focus of many online businesses. This is largely due to the fact that websites which are well optimised get a lot more visitors than those which do not.
This trend has however had some unexpected consequences, as many so-called experts look for quick fixes and use techniques designed to cheat both the search engines as well as users. These techniques are often called "black-hat SEO".
Here are five of the worst examples of such SEO cheats:
1. Keyword Stuffing - anybody with any knowledge of SEO will tell you that if you have a keyword you would like to rank highly for in the search engines, then you need to make sure that it features prominently on your website. However, many choose to take this advice too far, placing the crucial words and phrases all over their pages, regardless whether it is appropriate or not. This can not only put Google or Bing off, but will certainly not be popular among the actual visitors.
2. Hidden Content - some website owners try to avoid the above problem of their website content looking poor to visitors because of keyword stuffing, instead deciding to hide such text. This can be done either by placing those crucial phrases in the background and making it the same colour as thus in order to make it invisible to human eye. Another technique involves publishing of keyword stuffed content on pages accessible to the search engines, but not to users. Both methods are hugely disliked by the search engine operators.
3. Purchasing of links - links are said to be crucial to achieving good SEO results. This has meant that many people try to cheat and buy them rather than spending large amounts of time trying to gain them legitimately. There are websites which openly sell links and if you own a website then you would have most likely received emails from people offering to link to you in return for money. Links are meant to be created because others like your website and its content and search engines are getting increasingly good at spotting any links not gained in this way.
4. Spammed Meta Data - meta information is one of the many ways in which you can tell the search engines what your website is about. Most of it cannot be seen by users and includes things like titles and descriptions of pages. It is yet another area exploited by those who are looking to trick the system and make quick if undeserved wins. They do this by stuffing meta's with keywords, hoping that it will help their rankings for those phrases. This may not affect the user experience as much, but is nonetheless seen as cheating.
5. Duplicate Content - search engines love fresh and unique content. If you update your website regularly, you will soon find that your rankings have improved. A very common way of bending the rules in this area is to re-publish the same pages or articles over and over again. Although it could win you some credits at the start, all the search engines can easily spot duplicate content and it is almost certain that this honeymoon period will not last.
You should avoid using any of the above techniques at all costs, as the search engines constantly try and find websites which try to dupe their results. Once they find such a site, they can drastically drop its appearances in their search results or even de-list those completely. This is a very serious punishment, which could potentially kill any business, which relies on customers to find it through search engines.
The most famous victim of such a penalty was probably the American chain - JC Penney, which was winning masses of online traffic for months, until Google found out that they were not playing by the rules and decided to manually decrease their search rankings. You could argue that a company of such size should be able to go on despite of such punishment, but if yours is a fresh business, then you will have almost no chance of succeeding unless you appear high in search results.
SEO can be a fantastic way for even small brands to compete against some of the biggest ventures, but there is a dark side to it - be sure not to cross that line.