Illegal SEO Techniques
Dangerous, Unethical, Strategies That Will Get Your Site Blacklisted By The Search Engines
LINK FARMS
also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.
A link farm is a series of websites created
solely for housing gratuitous links that point to
a collection of websites. It can also be a
network of websites interlinking with each
other.
Such websites are considered illegal in the
eyes of Google and major search engines
because they aim to achieve high rankings for
websites that haven’t earned those rankings
through good content and overall quality.
As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or
spamdexing a search engine, is highly
dangerous.
Even if your website has great content, if you
or your SEO consultant use this technique,
your website will still get penalized or banned
because the engines figure that if you did have
good content you wouldn’t resort to such
sneaky tactics designed to trick them.
How To Guard Against It
When an SEO professional tells you that he or
she will secure incoming links for you, ask
them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer is that they will target
specific, pre-existing and established websites
to gain an incoming link from them to you (in
most cases without having to link back to
them).
If a professional tells you that they will build
you hundreds or thousands of pages across
different domains that will link to your website,
do NOT work with them as this will severely
cripple your website.
Also periodically search your domain name in
the major search engines to see which sites
are pointing to you. If you see anything out of
the ordinary, such as websites whose domains
are extremely long or gibberish (lots of
numbers and random or inappropriate words)
or pages that are simply long lists of links,
approach your SEO professional about getting
your site removed from these pages and find
out how they appeared there in the first place.
Doorway Pages
Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages,
Gateway Pages, etc.
Doorway Pages are a form of landing page that
is designed solely for the search engine and
oftentimes isn’t even viewable to the human
visitor. These pages often use a redirect script
that automatically points the visitor to another
page on the website without the human visitor
ever seeing the doorway page. This is also
known as cloaking and is clearly defined as an
illegal practice by Google and other search
engines.
The only time a landing page is acceptable by
search engines is if it is in the form of an
informative, well written article that human
visitors read and enjoy, where they are not
tricked into clicking or being redirected to the
website’s main pages.
How To Guard Against It
Make sure you understand exactly what kind
of pages are being added to your website and
be sure to look at most of them.
Ask your SEO professional point-blank whether
any of these pages will automatically redirect
to your website’s main page. If they say yes,
then they are breaking the rules and are well
aware of it, and we recommend you do NOT
work with such an individual or company
It doesn’t matter if they say they use a special
javascript or other redirect that is “legal” or
acceptable to Google. This is never the case
and though Google may not know about that particular trick yet, it will find out fast enough
and your site will get penalized as a result.
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