SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

Illegitimate SEO Techniques

The following SEO techniques fall in the grey area between legitimate tactics and search engine spam. These practices are not well received by search engines or your competition and can even result in getting your site banned from some search engines.

Grey-Hat SEO Techniques:

Paid Links
There is nothing wrong with purchasing links as an adjunct to your advertising strategy. However, it is not considered legitimate if the links are purchased with sole intent of increasing link-popularity or PageRank. In fact, sites like LinkAdage exist that have made a business out of the practice. Links purchased with the sole intent of boosting link-popularity can result in a penalty.

Duplicate Content
Redundant content on the web has become a serious problem for both search engines and the people that use them. It reduces the quality of search results when the same sites consistently appear at the top of results pages. The dilemma is largely due to the ever increasing popularity of affiliate programs.

In an effort aimed at thwarting this problem some search engines have installed filters that identify and eliminate redundant pages.

Some sites, by definition, will inherently have redundant content. Resource pages and directories are two examples of sites that must have redundant material in order to remain functional. These sites are not penalized by the search engines; however, the redundant material is often ignored.