Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

I'm about to give you some very useful information, but I want you to use it wisely. Let me be clear: Avoid the following techniques at all cost. Though this is not an exhaustive list by any means, it covers the major transgressions considered by all the major search engines.

1. Promoting keywords not related to your Web site

Perhaps the first and certainly the most common technique is to gain a ranking for a keyword that you know is not relevant to your Web site. This is considered spam by all the major search engines.

For instance, suppose you sell auto parts, and you are successful in securing a top ten ranking for the keyword phrase "Rolling Stone CDs." This would obviously be misleading to anyone who clicked on your listing.

Not only will this technique cause your site to be penalized by the search engines if detected, it will generate little, if any, valuable traffic, as it will all be unqualified traffic. If people are looking to purchased a CD and they arrive at your Web site that sells diesel engine tools, they will quickly realize they are in the wrong place and leave your site to look for a more relevant one. Your have wasted their time, you have wasted your own time in working to gain that ranking, and you have devalued the relevancy and value of that search engine's results.

2. Violating Unpublished Submission Limits

Search engines limit the number of pages that can be submitted from any one Web site or top-level domain name per day. If you submit your site to them over and over again, they likely will detect your attempts and drop your site for their index. So how can you avoid this? Do not submit more than one page of your Web site per day to any major search engine. It is often enough to simply submit your home page to the search engine, and it will spider your entire Web site. However, it you have determined that your site is being underrepresented in a particular search engine.

3. Redirecting pages too quickly

One (no longer effective) way to "page swap" is to quickly redirect someone from the page you submit to the search engines to your "target" or submission page.

When the major search engines discovered that companies were using this technique, they labeled the technique as spam. Currently, most search engines will not penalize a site that uses one of the many forms of page redirection. Instead, they combat the problem by indexing the contents of the destination page and simply ignoring the contents of the page that redirected users to it.

Search engines are cracking down on the use of techniques they consider inappropriate for gaining top ranking in their indexes. Though many techniques may constitute spam, some search engines define it more narrowly than others. A simple check of ethics ought to be enough for most people to ensure they are not employing a technique that might be deemed illicit by a major search engine. In some cases, certain techniques or practices could be employed inadvertently or used with the most benign intent but still constitute spam. I have attempted to describe the most illicit and brazen practices. It is important to note that techniques once considered spam may not be considered inappropriate today. Likewise, techniques that are widely accepted today could be misused.

Whether you are a search engine optimization specialist, SEP agency, or someone working to increase a Web site's ranking in the various search engines, if you understand an engine's fundamental raison d'etre, your interests can and should be aligned. The search engines are interested in delivering relevant documents to users of their service. If you do your job properly, are brutally honest with yourself about which keywords and keyword phrase searches your Web site legitimately relevant to, and optimize your content so that it included those keywords and phrases in the viewable body copy and META tags of your pages, you are in fact aiding the search engines in their mission to supply relevant documents to users.