Avoid Common SEO Mistakes
Intentionally or not, the following techniques are best to be avoided for any sites. Some webmasters
have employed these unethical SEO techniques to make their pages appear top in SERP (Search Engine
Result Page) for the specific keywords.
It is important to stay away from these techniques because it will be discovered sooner or later by the
Search Engine or your competitors. The penalty, of course, is to never find your site in the Search Engine
again. The following discusses several Black Hat techniques.
Keyword Stuffing
Also known as keyword stacking, this means to repeat the targeted keywords on the page until its ranked on top of the Search Engine. This often means having more than 50% keyword density for your page. This is definately a no no to all the webmasters because it is very easy to be detected by the Search Engines nowadays.
Doorway Pages
These are pages with highly relevant keywords in them (to get to top of the Search Engine) but do not have sites pointing to them. Their purpose is to only direct traffic to a website. Doorway pages are also known as gateway, bridge or hallway pages. This will often lead to the target website being banned from the Search Engine.
Duplicate content
Some designers have duplicated pages and even sites and place them in different domain names. Sometimes known as the mirror pages or sites, these duplicated pages are intended to help a site to increase the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). This technique, as usual, is easily detected by Major Search Engines like Google. Duplicated sites are most likely to be penalized.
Link Farms
Search Engine will detect any page as link farm if it contains hundreds of links in it. Link farms are
pages that have massive links to external pages.
Many people are afraid that having your site in one of these links will affect your ranking negatively.
The truth is, Search Engine will not penalize your site just for that because they understand that webmasters
do not have control over these and this will make the sabotage act prevails. Therefore, do not worry
if your link appear in one of the 'bad' pages.
Additional Guidelines
In additional to the guidelines provided by USESEO, it is advised that webmasters should also take a look at the Google's Quality Guidelines.