This is by no means a comprehensive list but here are some SEO tactics you should avoid at all costs. It may seem tempting to use such tactics and it may even be worthwhile in the short term, but what happens when you get caught? Your website gets delisted from the search engines and your business goes down the toilet. Bad SEO technique - Hidden keywords
Stuffing you website full of hidden keywords to improve your search engine rankings may initially seem like a good idea and may even boost your websites traffic for a short period of time. However, if you are caught, and you most probably will be, your website will be delisted from the search engines and your website will receive no search engine traffic.
Hidden keywords are considered a black hat SEO technique and should never be used
Bad SEO technique - Doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages designed for the search engines. They are often auto generated and contain little content of interest to a site visitor, instead containing links to other pages on your site with products to sell. Often a doorway page will contain hundreds of keywords, unreadable to a human but readable by the search engines.
They are designed to get ranked highly in the search engines and usually contain duplicate content, having been generated in their hundreds and thousands by automated scripts. The only difference in each doorway page would be the keywords it want to rank highly for.
You can get banned for this as these pages are designed for the search engines and not for humans. This is considered a black hat SEO technique and WILL get your website delisted/banned from the search engines.
Bad SEO technique - Google spamming
When using directory and article submission agencies to promote your site, do not go for the quick release option.
Adding 2000 links to directories in 1 day will only harm your website. It is seen as spamming the search engines, especially if all your links contain the same anchor text and descriptions.
Instead, opt for the slow submission option, where your site is submitted to only 100 or so per week. This way you gain good exposure and links with no danger of your site being banned or penalised. If possible, aways supply multiple descriptions and anchor texts too.
Bad SEO technique - Paid links
Google and other search engines place high relevancy on links to your site. Due to this fact, many companies started selling links from high page ranked pages. This proved to be an easy way to climb the search engine rankings and gain high page rank.
Or at least - that used to be the case.
The search engine companies earn billions, they are armed with many researchers, they are not stupid.. Techniques such as paid links used to work but not any more. Now Google and others can tell if you are using paid links and although they may not penalise you for doing it, they will discount those links. Yes, the ones you paid money for are no longer worth so much as 1 penny.
It's not going to get you banned but it is a black hat SEO technique and one you want to avoid. Paid links are a no no no no no....
Bad SEO technique - Mirror sites
It may at first seem worthwhile to set up separate sites all linking to your site, publishing all your content on that site too. But in reality the search engines will see the duplicate content and either....
1. Rank the incoming links as worthless.
2. In extreme cases penalise your website and ban your from their listings.
This is considered a Black Hat SEO technique and as such one you most certainly should avoid.
Bad SEO technique - Cloaking
Cloaking is where you design an area of your site where one thing is seen by the search engines and another by the site visitor. Google and the other search engines do not like this trickery, basically this is fooling the search engines into giving you better ranking positions for certain keywords and driving more traffic through your site.
Cloaking can be done through sneaky redirects or programming.
This technique will get you banned from the search engines and although it may work in the short term, in the long term it will only harm your website.
