Top Five Worst SEO Techniques

If you are building a website for your company or for yourself, it is important to realize that not all forms of SEO are equal. In fact, there are some techniques to outright avoid, since they will get you flagged as a spammer by the search engines, not to mention turn off your potential audience. Here are the top five worst SEO techniques -- use them at your own peril.

Keyword stuffing or keyword dilution

You have to write content for human eyes, not for the crawly bots of Google or Bing. If you have shoehorned your keywords in to the point where your site does not read coherently, you will get ranked lower in the search engines, or blacklisted altogether. Likewise, just using too many keywords on one page screams amateur to both readers and crawlers. Remember, good content always wins out.

Invisible text

This is a trick that might have worked for some sites back in 1998, but bots are much smarter these days. Stuffing your pages with content that humans cannot read will get you flagged or even banned from the index.

Duplicated content

If you own your content, do not use the exact same text across multiple pages of the same site (or multiple sites, for that matter.) It does not make the search engines think you have a large site -- it is actually lowering your page rank altogether. If your goal really is to delve into one specific topic, you have to minimally approach the topic from different angles.

Illegal content

If you do not own your content, and you have not gotten permission to publish it, you have stolen someone else's content, pure and simple. This will get you blacklisted from the search engines, and possibly sued -- the rewards are not worth the risk.