There are plenty of ways an ill-thought-out move can get you into trouble with the search engines. Many tactics which are frowned upon by search engines can be employed legitimately by websites. This can easily lead to confusion about what you can, and can’t do.

When you do wander into forbidden territory, there are remedies. The major search engines are aware that their rules can be breached for entirely innocent purposes. If you are unsure about techniques to use on your site, or need advice on re-inclusion, it is best to consult an expert. Talk to us at SEO Consult. Here, however, are just a few of the things to look out for that can reflect badly on your site:

Duplicate Content – Content that is featured on more than one web page. The exact effect of duplicate content on search engine ranking is unknown, but it is suspected to be a bad one.

Broken Links/Dead links – A link that now does not work. Broken links can happen if you don’t maintain your website periodically, or check that your links are up to date. Broken links can made your website look unreliable and can deter repeat traffic.

Doorway Pages/Gateway Pages – Just as the name suggests, a doorway page is a page that stands over the real entrance to a site. A doorway page uses keyword-rich content to draw the attention of search engines and viewers without providing any real information. Also known as a ‘bridge page’.

Hidden Text – Text that is the same colour as a site’s background and therefore not visible to a site’s human viewers. Hidden text is often used as a black-hat SEO technique to increase keyword density without tipping a site’s human visitors off.

Cloaking – Another black-hat SEO technique, designing a page so that the version visible to a search engine spider is different to that shown to a human viewer. Some cloaking occurs naturally on web pages, particularly those that contain images, and search engines discourage only the deliberately misleading use of cloaking.

Keyword stuffing – Just as it sounds, keyword stuffing involves saturating the page with keywords in order to draw search engine attention. Search engines frown on this practice as it values density over meaning.

Link farms – Web pages that feature only links, with no or little other content. The idea behind link farms is to provide backlinks for pages and boost their apparent popularity. However, search engines on the whole penalise sites associated with link farms and so the boost in ranking when participating in one is short-lived. Also known as Free for Alls.

Bad redirects – Redirects are used to forward viewers to a new page and are often used while a site is updating its pages. Sometimes, however, redirects are used to deliberately trick viewers onto a page that is different to the page they clicked on in the SERPs. An example of this is redirecting from an original page which ranked high for a search term to an unrelated page through which the site owner stands to make some money. If the redirected page is not similar to the old page, search engines are likely to penalise.

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