SEO Techniques to Avoid

There are several things that you can do to try to get your page listed higher on a search engine results page. As a rule of thumb, you should never try to trick or deceive a search engine in any way, or you risk being blacklisted by them and all your efforts will be wasted. Since the majority of your traffic will come from search engines the risk far outweighs the benefits in the long run.

Search engine operators spend a lot of time trying to create a useful tool for finding related content on the web, and we have the utmost respect for these efforts. Below is a list of some things we recommend that you never do when trying to achieve better listings.

Do not

Do anything to try to trick the search engines into listing your site better. If what you are doing is not listed as one of our search engine tips the search engines will likely view it as spam and penalise you.

Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color. This has often been used to keyword stuff a web page. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit identical pages. For example, do not duplicate a page of your site, give the copies different file names, and submit each one. Search engines can detect this and view it as spam.

Submit the same page to any engine more than once within 24hrs (in fact you should only ever need to submit to any search engine once. Once a Search Engine knows your website exists it will crawl it at regular intervals anyway)

Use a search engine optimization or submit service that promises you a top ranking by optimising your page and submitting and resubmitting your site to thousands of search engines. We have yet to find a service like this that really works, and many will use some or many of the techniques listed above, which can actually hurt, rather than help your site to rank well.