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SEO No Nos
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| Introduction |
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There
are numerous ways of performing Search Engine Optimisation. There are plenty of good techniques, or "White Hat SEO",
there are also plenty of bad techniques ot "Black Hat SEO". Black Hat SEO is not a long term strategy for any web site
looking to stick around for more than 1 year. Today's Search Engines have developed sophisticated ways of discovering Black Hat techniques used on web sites artificially or "illegally" enhancing their search
results. When these search engine spamming techniques are found by the major search engines,
the offending site could well be banned entirely from their index.
We'll cover a few below. |
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| Invisible Links and Text |
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| Using CSS to match the background
colour of a page and some of the text or links on it. The visitor won't
necessarily see it but the keywords and links ratio get boosted "illegally." If
you think a site might be doing this, highlight the whole page with
your cursor and mouse. See any text that doesn't show otherwise? Thet's
invisible text and that will get penalized. |
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| Title Tag |
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| The Title should be kept below 80 characters, any longer triggers filters that
could be applied by the various indexes that monitor this useful seo tool. |
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| Alt Text |
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| Stuffing the image alt text tags full of keywords may have worked a long time ago but not anymore. The value of the
keywords in the alt text tags has been significantly diminished by the major engines. Just use descriptive words about the picture,
don't waste your time or get banned for that. |
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| Filenames and Folders |
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| Filenames and folders are great tools but don't overdo it. Limit yourself to 2 subfolders and filenames that are
descriptive but not whole paragraphs full of keywords. |
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| Cloaking |
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| Cloaking is a technique where, using the server, the owner can determine what type of user is visiting a site. A user
in this case will be a user-agent. A user-agent can be a normal person, a spider or robot. Once the type of user agent has
been determined, the site owner serves a page. Cloaking presents different pages to different user agents. So, for black hat
seo's purposes, a keyword stuffed, search engine specific optimised page will be served to the spider/robot. The page will be
optimised for one topic, boosting it's search results, but when a real user visits the site, the page could be entirely
different. |
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| Floating Elements |
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We'll define these Floating Elements like this:
Picking a spot on a web site, packing it full of keywords and links and
then hiding it behind an iframe. The user won't see it, but the search
engine spiders will. Boost your results this way and you'll get nailed. |
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| Links |
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Exchange links by all means but don't exchange with sites completely
irrelevant to yours, to bad neighborhoods and to any site that requests
a link. That's just not good practice.
The anchor text inyour links should also be varied so that not all links use the same anchor text. |
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| Comments |
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| Don't use unnecessary comments in your code stuffed full of keywords. Users don't see it but search engines do. |
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| Conclusion |
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| Optimise your site effectively and cleanly using White Hat SEO, you'll be around a lot longer, your users will
appreciate it and you won't be worried about getting kicked out at any moment. |
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| Livesurf |
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