How To Keep Out of Trouble
With Search Engines

Chris Jaeger
Sell More Weddings
(978) 283-8295

There are several things, considered "spamming" or "cheating" at search engines that some webmasters try to do to get pages and sites listed higher in search engine results. If there is one thing to remember: never try to trick or cheat a search engine in any way, or your web site risks being penalized or possibly even blacklisted. 

Do some of these techniques produce results? Sometimes yes, for a short time, but since a significant amount of your traffic can come from search engines, the risks associated with spamming far outweigh the benefits of following the search engine rules in the long run.

My Top 10 Search Engine “Do Not” List

(1) DO NOT- Do anything to trick or try to cheat the search engines into listing your site more favorably. Search engines will likely view this as spam and penalize you, or worse, permanently blacklist your domain name from their index. If you get blacklisted in one search engine, don’t be surprised if it carries over into other search engines. Likelihood of getting penalized or blacklisted from cheating: 90% +

(2) DO NOT- List keywords one after the other anywhere except in your keywords meta tag. By "list" I mean something like - keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4, etc. 

Ex: weddings, wedding planning, wedding consultant, wedding coordinator, wedding planner, weddings, wedding planning, wedding consultant, wedding coordinator, wedding planner - and so on.

There are very few legitimate reasons that a list of keywords would actually appear on a web page or within the page's HTML code and the search engines know this. While you may feel you have a legitimate reason for doing, this I would recommend avoiding it so that you do not risk being penalized by the search engines. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 100%

(3) DO NOT- Use the same color text on your page as the page's background color – anywhere on your web page. Also known as "hiding" words, this is an old technique that actually did work for awhile. It was called “keyword stuffing” a web page using "invisible text". Today it doesn’t work and search engines can easily detect this and will view it as spamming. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 100%

(4) DO NOT- Use multiple instances of the same tag. For example, using more than one title tag. Search engines can detect this very easily and will view it as spam and think you are trying to cheat. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 75% +

(5) DO NOT- 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 very easily and view it as spam. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 100%

(6) DO NOT- Submit the same page to any search engine more than once within 24 hrs. I actually don’t recommend it being done more than once per month, until you are initially listed. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 100%

(7) DO NOT- Use any keywords in your keywords meta-tags that do not directly relate to the content of your page. This is cheating and even if you get away with it for a little while, sooner or later the search engine spiders will figure out what you are doing. Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 80%

(8) DO NOT- Waste your money using “automatically submit your web site to 3000 search engines… for only $19.95” schemes. These offers are complete frauds and they don’t work. Actually, using “automated” submission tools can actually hurt your ability to get good search engine positioning. Search engines know the difference between a manual submission and an automated submission and may actually penalize you for using an automated submission process (see #1 above). Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 80%

(9) DO NOT- Host your web site on $10.00/month hosting services that typically accommodate SPAMMERS. A search engine can penalize or permanently ban all web sites and domains from a specific IP hosting address (DNS). Legitimate hosting services and service providers don’t allow search engine spamming on their systems and their hosting is still inexpensive (under $40/month). Likelihood of getting penalized, reduced ranking, or blacklisted: 90% +

(10) DO NOT- Host your web site on a “free” hosting service. Search engines know where these services are and who they are. It’s very unlikely that your web site will ever achieve even decent positioning in any of the search engines. Likelihood a bride can find your “free hosting” web site: Less than 10%.

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