What You Should not Do to Improve Your Rankings on the Search Engines

Your website’s ranking will improve if it possesses good content, well-chosen keywords and quality links that point to your webpage: There are minimal shortcuts. Over the years, web aficionados have created a host of techniques to “trick” the spiders, commonly referred to as “black hat methods,” though it is better to avoid them altogether.

The search engines (and many individuals) consider these techniques unethical and, despite the possibility that you may get results in the short run, in the long run your site could get permanently banned from the SERPs. Furthermore, the majority of these techniques creates usability issues and worsens the overall user experience.

Though all search engines look down upon these techniques, we will focus on Google given its market share and the amount of research that has been conducted regarding their ranking methods.

Some examples of “Black Hat SEO Methods” include:

-Repeatedly submit your site to the search engines

Submitting your website to the search engines an extraordinary large amount in a short time frame is not a good tactic. You will achieve nothing in the short term! Also, the search engines could interpret it as spamming and nix your website.

-Keyword "Stuffing"

This term refers to the practice of hiding a lot of keywords within your website’s content, so it is unlikely to be seen by a visitor but will be visible to search engines.

This is usually done by making the font color of text match the background color or by making the text very small. Keyword stuffing is ineffective and may get offending web sites removed from a search engine’s index.

-Doorway Pages

Doorway pages (or Gateway pages) are pages that have been designed primarily for search engines, and not for human beings, since their sole purpose is to be optimized to achieve high SERP rankings for a particular phrase. Doorway pages usually have very little in the way of original content and often cloak or redirect users to the intended web site.

Since many search engines penalize websites for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages trick the user into clicking on a link to get them to the desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.

Be aware of affiliate programs, because some of these may look like doorway pages to Google.

-Cloaking

Doorway pages may also engage in cloaking, a method whereby the website shows one version to its visitors and a different version to the crawlers, using server side scripts.

Google has promised to ban any site that engages in cloaking.

-Link to “Bad Neighborhoods”

Google calls spamming sites “bad neighborhoods,” and linking to them is a surefire way to lower your PageRank.

How do you know it's a bad neighborhood? Check the website’s PageRank and scan the website for any of the usual “Black Hat SEO” violations.

-Stealing images/ text blocks from another domain

For obvious reasons, these are considered copyright violations and Google responds strongly if you are reported.

-Link buying

Link buying is great if you DO NOT get caught. According to Google’s Patent, they hate link-buying, because it corrupts their Page Rank (PR) model in the worst way possible.

Google will be especially wary if:

A site has links it really doesn't merit.
A site gets tons of links in a short time period.
A site possesses links from high-PR, unrelated sites.
In conclusion, it’s better to avoid these techniques and instead improve your ranking using ethical methods. Whenever you feel tempted, just remember how hard you’ve worked to get where you are and that the search engines can take that all away in the time it takes to do a search (i.e. approximately 0.22 seconds)!

Techniques that Aren’t Unethical but May Prevent High Rankings

Though these techniques aren’t deemed “unethical,” they will negatively affect your rankings on the SERPs:

-ZERO links to you

Websites MUST have at least 1 incoming link from another website that Google knows about to REMAIN in the index.

-Text is presented in graphics only

Text represented graphically is invisible to search engines. Therefore, if a website possesses no actual body text, the search engines will interpret that as meaning it has no content, and, since “Content is King,” it will rank low.

Keyword Dilution

If a single webpage targets too many unrelated keywords, detracting from theming, then the page will not rank high for any keyword. It is better to dedicate a single page to a single keyword or keyword phrase.

-Full Flash Site

Flash used to be considered SEO suicide since most search engines cannot read flash content. Search engines are designed to handle static content and flash is actually a running program, so it's much harder to analyze than plain HTML code.

Though the situation has been steadily improving, it is advisable to not create full flash sites and to instead integrate flash banners, videos, etc. within HTML.

-Dynamic Pages

Dynamically generated pages don't really exist until a user selects the given variable(s) that generate the pages. This makes the life of a webmaster easier because it streamlines the page creation process.

However, search engine crawlers cannot read and are not trained to understand any of the dynamic databases of URL's, which contain either a query string delimited by a question mark or other database characters, such as: #&*!% referred to as "spider traps".

Furthermore, keywords in the URL are a definite ranking booster.

Compare, www.niceboobs.com/jenna-jameson-tits.html versus www.niceboobs.com/answer.py? answer=40349&topic=8522

What to do about this one?!?

Vile language - ethnic slur

As members of the adult industry, this one can be a bit tricky.

Google delivers its search results based upon its algorithm, and does not tweak the results, which was made clear after the George Bush/Miserable Failure Google Bomb (Wikipedia's Entry of a Google Bomb).

Google is very specific about what it considers vile language, and though it is unclear as to whether its search algorithm frowns upon them (since they guard that equation more strongly than their financials), Google Adsense punishes advertisers by causing PSAs (Public Service Ads) to be substituted in place of normal AdWords ads. PSAs do not pay any money, but count as impressions, thereby diluting AdSense statistics and degrading search engine marketing efforts.

Bad words for Google include the George Carlin 7 bad words you can't say on TV (which are piss, shit, fuck, cunt, cock-sucker, mother-fucker and tits) and about 150 more, belonging to groups such as Death, Sex and possibly Terrorism.

Though it would be near impossible for the adult webmaster to completely avoid any and all “vile” language on their websites, it is important to keep in mind how Google’s attitude toward this language may affect rankings now and in the future. More resources for the adult webmaster.