Loading ...There are a good number of SEO practitioners who will stop at nothing to get to the top of a search engines results which often results in their sites being either temporarily or permanently excluded because of their use of unethical or downright black hat SEO techniques which can have a serious impact on compromising search results to the point that search engines are in danger of starting to delver irrelevant results.
Keyword density vs. keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is unethical as it uses the keyword in question through the text, suspiciously too often. The ideal and allowable density should be between 3% and 7% across text document and anything above 10% is considered stuffing and means your pages will probably get noticed for doing this as it starts to make no sense to a reader. It is sufficient to include keywords in the title, headings and first paragraphs but if you find that you are leaning toward stuffing for a frequently used keyword, try replacing some of the occurrences with synonyms instead.
While bold and italics are considered important by search engines, if target keywords are done this way, they look unnatural and will not help push your page up.
Doorway pages and hidden text
Before PageRank algorithms, doorway pages were common practice and were actually not really considered unethical. These are pages that are made especially for search engines in an attempt to trick them into giving them higher positions and trick more uses to the site.
Hidden text is similar to doorway pages in that the developer includes text that is invisible to a reader but it is included in the HTML source code, trying to fool a search engine into believing that they page is actually keyword rich.
These are both considered unethical SEO practices.
Duplicate content and link spamming
Content is everything in SEO, but not duplicate content. Duplicate content is where the same text that is found on the same site is copied and pasted, this results in lower rankings. Syndicated content however is not considered duplicate content, if it were then news agencies would drop it from their sites faster than a hot potato.
However, content is not always duplicated with malice, so it is a good idea to keep checking if you are guilty of this and fix it. You also need to take measure against allowing someone else to illegally copy your content for there own use as this is more common than realised. Using a tool such as Similar Page Checker can help with this.
Another unethical SEO practice is spamming, in terms of link spamming. While backlinks are important, getting massive amounts of backlinks from link farms or blacklisted sites will hurt your rankings. So too will outbound links if they outnumber your backlinks considerably.
Search engines do not make the differentiation between sites that have been unintentionally over-optimised or intentionally over-optimised, so whether or not your intentions are good, they don’t care, so always be careful not to overstep the mark and continue to practice ethical SEO.
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