Unethical Onpage Optimization Techniques – Be Aware!

As we are more concerned about the best good practices to be followed in SEO, we should also be aware of all the spam techniques that are followed in the industry to get rid of those activities.

Spam Techniques are used to rank higher in the search engines results page in an unethical manner. This may be against search engine rules.

Here I have listed some of the techniques that has to be avoided in onpage optimization

Keyword Stuffing or Keyword Stacking: It is an excessive use of keywords to increase its frequency on the page and now a days most of the search engines have the ability to analyze the webpage and discover whether the keywords are not stuffed for the sake of increasing keyword density of the page.

Meta Tag Stuffing: Repeating keywords in the meta description and using keywords that are unrelated to the site’s content .And using multiple versions of the title tag in the HTML code.

Hidden Text or Invisible Text: Keywords used in the page will be invisible to us because it uses the same color as the background or it may be of tiny font or it may be hidden in the html code such as no frame sections, and no script sections. These are done to increase link popularity.

Alt Attributes: Spammers use alt attributes for images which are as small as 1*1 pixels by targeting the keywords to increase keyword density.

Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages: It is a fake page containing content stuffed with keywords and phrases that a user will never see this page in the website. It is purely for search engine spiders, to index the links for ranking high in the SERP’s.

Hidden Links: Hidden links are links to other pages and sites that are seen by search engine spiders but not by surfers. This is done mainly to increase the link popularity. Now a days most of the search engines finds this and penalize those sites.

Meta Refresh Tag: It is just an information to the browser to redirect to another page after a certain period of time. If the redirect time is of “0” ,”1″ it is considered as 301 permanent redirect by most of search engines and redirect time with 2 ,or more than 2 seconds are considered as 302 temporary redirect. Both these redirects are advisable where as meta refresh is not advisable by search engines.

Web Page Cloaking: Providing different content to specific crawlers or spiders and a different content to the users depending on IP address,regions etc.

Header Tags: Keywords are targeted in H1 tag more than once for increasing the keyword density. The best practice is to use main keyword headings with one H1 tag and all the sub headings with other heading tags.

Code Swapping: The webmaster optimizes a page with more relavant keywords and content for top ranking, and then swaps another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.

Mirror Websites: Having multiple domains with the same content and design, which may create duplicate issues for the website.

The above mentioned techniques can be avoided for optimizing a website more search engine friendly.

In my next post I will be addressing some of the techniques that a webmaster should avoid in off page optimization.

Disclaimer: The post is completely based on individual thoughts and SEO Services Group bears no responsibilities for the thoughts reflected in the post.