SEO Methods to Avoid
Many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies can help you get better rankings, but there is no company that can tell you exactly how the search engine algorithms rank web pages. This means that although they may have the knowledge about what works best and what doesn’t work very well, they can not directly control the search engines. They can make your site more accessible to the search engines however. There are also a number of people trying to do SEO from their home using a variety of SEO tools and a little gained knowledge. Many of them don’t know what does and doesn’t work. Below are a few SEO methods that that were once thought to work, but have been found to not be very helpful and may even damage your standing.
Link reciprocation is a standard technique used by a number of websites. The idea is that if incoming and outgoing links are good, getting some going both ways is really good. The problem here is that it is easy to search and see what is happening. It has been supposed that the reason these don’t work out all that well is because the search engine can see what is happening and discounts both links.
Hidden text was a common practice for people when Google first announced that they weren’t going to be looking at metadata anymore as a way of making up for all the spammy metadata sites had put up. Not only does it not work very well, but it is considered cheating and can get you banned if the search engines think you are doing it to trick them. There are some codes for various websites and forums that have to do with television that let the search engine know that it is hidden because it is a spoiler. You may also want to think about the fact that your competitors will be able to see these words if they are tech savvy which will give them a hint at your own marketing campaign and let them get ahead of you.
Displaying different websites to both the user and the search engine spider, sometimes referred to as cloaking , is not only a bad way of messing with the search engines, but it is also a good way to get banned quickly if they figure out what is going on. The essence of this is that there is a website that the search engine is seeing, but when someone goes to that page the human will see something else. Because of the ethics involved it is no wonder that those who are discovered are banned.
Of course there are exceptions to every rule. Have you used any of these and had them work?