Illegal SEO Techniques

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a manner of increasing the number of visitors in a website by means of being at the top in the results of a search engine. When a website ranks high, it has a greater chance that more people will view their site. But more and more websites today are aiming for the top, and sometimes they have to use spamming to achieve it. Search engine optimization spamming, when used by a website, will increase and heighten the chances that a website will appear at the top of the results on a search engine. Websites and businesses today that use this illegal technique believe that SEO spamming techniques are not necessarily unethical and that it can do no harm.

The truth is that it is wrongful and unlawful for spamming websites to control search engines to gain top rankings. Any website that uses techniques to deceive a search engine is considered as spam, and if you join them, you will only be putting your website and business at risk. There is a possibility that you can be banned from search engines for a very long time.

Everyone deserves the right to be protected from these deceitful people who steal visitors that are rightfully yours. Not only that, they also take away your income opportunities.

What Are The Techniques Used In SEO Spamming?

Here are the most common techniques that you should avoid:

1. Keyword Stuffing

This term refers to the use of exact keywords specifically in your META tags or anywhere in your site repeatedly.

2. Hidden links and text

Some websites place hidden links with appropriate and numerous keywords in a certain webpage by using the same color of the text of the link with the background of the page. This way, only "spiders" can detect it and will then rank that site higher. So when search engines scan pages for certain keywords from a search request, the page with hidden links will automatically appear at the top.

3. The Sybil attack or the Mirror website

These terms refer to websites with the same contents but having different URL. These sites link to one another to obtain more visitors illegally.

4. The Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are websites of poor quality but use spamming techniques to rank high for one or several keywords. These sites may contain the same contents of other sites with no navigation menu but only a link to the main page.

5. Cloaking

Cloaking functions to deliver many different pages for visitors and search engines. Some servers are made to identify the IP addresses of spiders, allowing them to provide content-rich pages while displaying their web pages for visitors. It can also redirect a visitor to their home page.

6. Link Farms

These are pages with 50 to maybe a thousand more links to websites whose contents have no similarities with your website. This is usually used for the purpose of obtaining link popularity.

What Are The Risks and Dangers of SEO Spamming?

Though it can bring high rankings for your website, always remember that these effects are only temporary. It can only go on for days, weeks, or months but once your sites are caught using spamming techniques, they will be banned from the search engine index for a long time, possibly even for a lifetime. Once you are banned, it will be very difficult for your site to be re-indexed. You will probably have to start all over from purchasing a domain name.

Because of the growing number of SEO spammers, top search engine sites such as Google are improving the quality of search technology to provide us with faster and more advanced filters for spam that only clutter up the site, provide us with useless information, and is a waste of time.

It is very wise to think twice before using these techniques, because there is a huge possibility of being caught once you join the illegal and undesirable ways of an SEO spammer.