SEO Don'ts - What should you definitely not do?

[trevovski1]

There is a lot of chat about what things can be done to help with seo so I thought I would start a thread about things that will definitely (or atleast most likley) cause your site's rank harm?

There is a probably a long list of things so feel free just to throw in a couple of ideas!

[treeline]

Hidden text.
Doorway pages.
Sneaky redirects.

[jatar_k]

>> What should you definitely not do?

get caught

[trevovski1]

Treeline, to make this a really useful thread could you define each of the three ideas that you suggest....just so there is no confusion with people who think they know what you mean.

[treeline]

By far the most important page on this subject (which doesn't always define the terms) is Google's Guidelines for webmasters. I'd suggest you read it carefully, especially the bottom of the page which addresses exactly the question asked above. See:

[google.com...]

You may be able to find better definitions on the WebmasterWorld glossary:
[webmasterworld.com...]

But, in the spirit of the questions, here's my take:

Hidden Text: Text on a page that isn't readable by a normal browsing human. The most common reason is the text color and page color are the same or similar. This can get you outright banned, even happened to BMW.

Doorway Pages: webpages setup specifically to interest search engines, not humans. Often one per keyword, frequently on a different domain than the one you want people to see. The page itself has little redeeming value and will either redirect people to the "real" page or otherwise push them to go there.

Sneaky Redirects: Ever click on a link or image and end up somewhere that seems completely different or unexpected? Sometimes the screen flashes once or twice? The basic problem here is creating a page with lots of good keywords or optimization for search engines, but if a real person shows up they are automatically redirected to somewhere else. Clever ways to hide this intent from the search engine make it sneakier. The webmaster doesn't want real browsers seeing any of the page, ever.

The common principle of each of these, and probably most search engines' public enemy number one, is trying to show different info to people and robots. If they figure out you're trying to do this, you'll be sorry.

[webexpjy]

Just learned this one:

keyword saturation.

[aaronjf]

How about hidding text through CSS? Has Google caught on to this one yet. There was a small discussion that got started about a year and a half or so ago about this, but CSS was just really coming mainstream so no one had any conclusions yet.

Hard one especially since there are a lot of legitimate reasons for doing this.

[Knysna]

A simple rule to follow is...

Don't try and make the search engine spiders view a different page to a human.

[SEOdevhead]

Hard to say if google penalizes for display:none in css. They certainly go through your CSS... question is, do they parse it? I think any text within a display: none wont be counted. I was doing some fahrner image replacement stuff with CSS and noticed that my pages weren't being pulled up with those exact phrases that were in the display: none blocks.

[deliriumtremens]

With regard to keywords, I'd add that meta tags can be a problem. So many people are reading "how to create a website" articles that are 5+ years old and thinking that what they need to do is stuff their meta tags full of keywords.

So, don't over-stuff your metatags, and for god's sake don't use keywords in them that don't appear on the page.

I think this relates to the idea that SEs look for over-optimisation. So make your page look natural. You don't need to use the same keyword in 5 <H> tags etc.

What does your code look like? Does it look like a guide to laying out a document or does it look like it's optimised for a bot and a mess for humans?

[anand84]

Duplication of content if you have topics that can be there in more than one of your websites..