Common Errors that Kill Search Engine Ranking

by Sharon Housle, 8/13/2007

Tricking the search engines just does not work. The search engines do not look kindly upon webmasters who attempt to deceive the search engines about the content contained on a webpage.

1. Cloaking

Cloaking a website is a stealth technique used to provide a copy of a web page to search engines while providing an alternate copy to website visitors. The website copy provided to the search engine is optimized and not always reflective of the real content contained on the webpage.

2. Hidden Text

Another deceptive tip that will result in a search engine ban, is done by incorporating text into a website that is not visible to the naked eye, but is visible to search engine spider. There are two ways that underhanded webmasters might attempt this, the first is by changing the font color to match the web page's background color. The second fallacious way of deceiving the search engine using hidden text is by using a single character like a '.' period as a link. Black hat webmasters might attempt this as a way to increase their websites link popularity.

3. Bad Links

While this is not as much a deceptive practice as an indication that the webpage content has been abandoned, links to webpages that no longer exist is an indication to search engines that the content is no longer relevant.

4. Lack of Meta Tags

A website that does not make use of title and description tags, will not result in a ban but could impact the ability for a website to rank well. The title and description of a website should be different on each and every web page.

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