Search engine optimisation can be extremely powerful for your online visibility… Particularly in attracting new custom to your site.
Previously, I created the Ultimate Guide to Improving your Search Engine Rankings – highlighting best practice ways to optimise for search engines.
There are, however, other ways of improving (or destroying!) your search engine rankings: ‘Black Hat’ techniques, otherwise known as Spamdexing.
Spamdexing is using methods to cheat a search engine into listing a site/page highly.
The problem with this: Search engine spiders are smart; thus you run the risk of being blacklisted. And that’s not good news.
Examples of Spamdexing
1) Invisible text
Easily detected.
Hiding text by either making it so small it isn’t visible or making it the same colour as the background.
2) Doorway pages
Created purely to get high rankings – the content is not useful to the reader. The reader is then redirected (either automatically or by clicking) to the actual page.
3) Using Link Farms
As you probably know, getting links to your site is essential when optimising for search engines.
Link farms are websites set up to provide links to eachother; these are not deserving or relevant links.
When link farms are discovered by search engines, all sites are penalised.
So, the lesson is…
Avoid these techniques!
As tempting as they may be, they have a high risk attached to them. And as being highly ranked in search engines is so valuable, it’s generally not worth it.