Although SEO might seem to be a simple and relatively easy-to-use way of improving your website ranking, which helps your customers find your website easier, there is also a possibility of abuse. This can finally lead to your website being excluded from the search engines listings. Therefore it is crucial to know the difference between techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design (so called “White Hat” SEO) and those that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise their effect (referred to as “Black Hat” SEO or spamdexing).

Another interesting fact to know is that search engines change their search criteria daily. There are usually very subtle changes an average website owner does not need to track. Their purpose is to prevent spamdexing or at least make it as difficult as possible.

Bad search engine optimisation techniques can get you blacklisted from a search engine. Some techniques that are considered spam are cloaking, invisible text, tiny text, identical pages, doorway pages, refresh tags, link farms, filling comment tags with keyword phrases only, keyword phrases in the author tag, keyword density too high, mirror pages and mirror sites.

While these techniques might work to give you a higher ranking for short time in the long run they will hurt your website.

Therefore we recommend you rather avoid the following:

• Doing anything to trick the search engines. If what you are doing is not listed as one of the previous “white hat SEO” the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalise you.
• List keywords anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. It is thus not usual to name keywords alone without any other “sentence stuffing”. Search engines know this and will consider you spamdexing.
• Use the same colour text on your page as the page’s background colour. This has been used by some people to stuff their web pages with keywords, which is not a clear practice. Search engines are able to detect this and view it as spam.
• Use the same meta tag more than once on the same web page, for example using more than one title tag.
• Use any keywords in your keywords meta tag that do not relate to the content of your website.