Spam refers to any strategy that is designed to cheat the search engines into giving you a higher ranking than your page deserves and spam strategies are offensive or unethical in some way.
“Black Hat” SEO companies use spamming techniques to get better ranking on Google. However, they risk the possibility of getting their websites banned from Google. Black Hat SEO is a short term strategy, its not a strategy for a legitimate business.
Here are 7 spamming techniques to avoid:
- Don’t keyword stuff tags or repeat keywords over and over again in your text – For example: <META name=”keywords” content=”holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday cruises,holiday”
- Don’t use invisible text – ie: white text on a white background.
- Don’t use “machine generated” pages – We had 2 prospective clients last week having ranking issues. Both were using machine generated content to build their sites out to 30-40,000 pages. Your just giving Google a reason to penalize you.
- Stay away from hidden links or hidden text – See if you can find the hidden link in this web page (http://foxtagandlabel.com/) to “Rentex.com”.
- Don’t participate in link farms -Before you add your website to a directory, check out the page on which your listing will appear. If there are more than 100 links on 1 page, don’t bother adding your site unless its Yahoo, Best of the Web or Business.com
- Do everything in MODERATION – Black Hat SEOs generate a huge volume of links in a relatively short period of time, so don’t go crazy with any one tactic or you risk being lumped in with the bad guys.
- Don’t link to “bad” neighborhoods -You can tell a person’s character by the friends they keep. Google looks at outbound links in the same manner.
Make sure to read Google’s Terms of Service https://policies.google.com/terms before before moving forward with your SEO strategy or contact us if you feel you have been penalized and need help getting re-instated with Google.