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Common Unethical SEO Tactics
About the only standard for practitioners to actually stick to, are Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and SEO Starter Guide, neither of which is commonly read by average site owners. Click on the links below for some of the more common techniques.
Hidden Text - Hiding text from a site's visitors to fool Google into perceiving greater relevance is a popular approach still commonly used, with techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated. |
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Yes I know, the descriptions of these Black Hat Techniques are very basic and non-technical. In fact, they're specifically aimed at the sort of site owner who won't have a clue what I'm talking about when I mention User-Agents and such, and needs a basic understanding why Google considers what their SEO does as unethical.
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Cloaking - A cloaked website distinguishes between real visitors and search engine spiders, and serves different page content to the search engine than it does to genuine humans.
Hidden Links - Much like Hidden Text, hiding links from a visitor's view has proven a popular approach with many unethical SEOs trying to harness a link's promotional power without it getting in the way.
Link Farms - Inbound links are an essential part of any website's success. And what better way is there to get these links than to launch a bunch of near-identical pages, all linking back to one main website?
Domain Farms - The domain farm is just a larger version of the link farm. Instead of single pages, you launch entire websites, and instead of linking them back to one site, you interlink them all.
Cookie-Cutter Pages - Basically, this refers to a set of web pages, usually disguised as an information directory, which contain identical content, with Target-Keywords strategically inserted into the text.
Note: The Google Search Quality Team is aware of all these unethical tactics. Don't do it!
What use is it if your site gets penalized after a little while, and all your rankings disappear?
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