Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 12. Avoiding SEO Pitfalls

Google—and other major search engines—urge you to avoid overly aggressive SEO practices when you build your site. Google has actually taken the trouble to spell out SEO practices it regards as naughty (the list can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters). You should pay attention to this list as if it speaks the mind of every major search engine, not just Google. Google’s position that building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of providing useful content isn’t totally off-the-wall, although it assumes a world where everything always works.

According to Google, good search-engine-citizen web sites do not:

Employ hidden text or links

For example, users cannot read white text on a white background (and will never even know it is there). But the search engine will still parse this text. This rule comes down to making sure that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages

Also called stealth, this is a technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine than to the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way

It’s easy to redirect the user’s browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposes—for example, to make a user think they are on a page associated with a well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer’s page—it’s frowned upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious schemes

Linking to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the Web may actually hurt your own PageRank (or search ...