Eight worst search optimization techniques

June 22, 2007

Some webmasters and SEO companies will use any means they can think of to get a high rank in search engine listings. That’s not always a good idea. Krissi Danielsson gives a detailed list of eight search engine optimization techniques you shouldn’t use, and why you shouldn’t use them.

Every site owner wants to be at the top of the search rankings. Better search engine rankings mean more site visitors, which means more business. Naturally, with the stakes as high as they are, site owners look for any means possible to get into the coveted top ten placements on the main search engines – especially Google.

There are a million and one optimization techniques out there that claim they can guarantee placement in the top ten results. Obviously, they all work with varying degrees of success. However, while many popular strategies may get you short-term success and temporarily boost your rankings, some tactics can actually end up hurting your placement, resulting in penalties or outright banning of your site from search engines – as well as alienating the very site visitors that you are trying to reach.

However, it’s in your best interest to look at any potential optimization technique with a critical eye and to be sure you know what you are doing. If you do your own search engine optimization, be very careful before trying any of the following techniques. If you hire an optimization firm, you will want to have a serious talk with your consultant before using any of the following strategies. In most cases, these tactics are a bad idea.

Invisible keywords embedded on the page

What it is:

Invisible keyword spamming is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Using text that is the same color as the background of a site, webmasters place “invisible” keywords on a site to increase the instances of targeted search terms and artificially inflate the relevance ranking for a particular search. It’s a common trick used by adult sites and Internet casinos, but it’s also used by a surprising number of mainstream sites and businesses. A similar tactic involves placing the keywords in a very small, sometimes unreadable font size at the bottom of a page.

Previously, keyword spamming had a downside in that the block with the invisible keywords took up space on the page and had to be tacked on in white space someplace, but now with DHTML many site owners place keywords in an invisible layer so that it doesn’t affect page layout and can actually be invisible to users.

Why you shouldn’t do it:

Not even considering the search engines, keyword spamming is annoying to users that pull up your page and discover it is not actually relevant to the terms for which they were searching. Secondly, search engines are starting to scan for this automatically and penalize sites that use this technique by dropping them from the database for a specific period of time.

(Part 1 of 5)

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