Whats the worst thing you could do?

[theperlyking]

I was recently looking at a site I'd "inherited" and the pages had two or even three sets of Keyword meta tags, I fixed it but wonder what effect this would have had on search engines - would it be seen as spamming or not?

On a similar subject I was wondering what ranks as the things most likely to get you buried for spamming, I know text the same colour as the backround is one, but what others?

[Marcia]

theperlyking, I believe the criteria is that anything the search engines perceive as trying to artificially manipulate the search results could give them grounds to call it spamming (if they catch it).

Aside from text hidden by using the same font and background color, text hidden by placing into a 1 pixel high TD, with a little CSS formatting thrown in, is most decidedly considered spam.

I just watched an entire site get nuked from the Google index for these two things - multiple meta tags and the tables trick. No other explanation is needed - that's what it had, and it was listed at Google one day and gone the next.

Interesting to note, however, is that while the web designer's site was completely removed, the client sites (who were undoubtedly totally innocent and unaware) were left in. Seems kind of fair and merciful, but no doubt they'll be looking for it. I've wondered how long it would take for this to get dealt with; it's surprising it stayed around for so long, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with those others after a few months. There are a LOT of them, and they've not been ranked that impressively, anyhow.

[theperlyking]

Its always scary designing a site and wondering if something you do may appear like spam to an algorithm somewhere.

I regularly run across sites that have keyword text the same colour as the backround, at the bottom of the page where most humans wouldnt notice it - yet they still seem to do reasonably well in engines.