Last updated on September 5th, 2010 at 06:04 pm

When you build your small business website you want to get high rankings in the search engines for your key-phrases.  As we have already discussed there are lots of ways to do this and equally there are lots of ways to not to do it.

I have listed below 11 things you should avoid if you want to not get your website banned from the search engines and stand a chance of getting some good results.

1. Duplicate Content/Sites – Do not set up multiple sites or site pages using basically the same content, even if the pages are slightly different and have a few different key-phrases spread around. This does not fool the search engines.  I recently came across a client that had four copies of their site, all with the same content, under four different domains – the engines had read some of each of the four sites and could not work out which was the main site that had to be displayed so it down-graded all of them.

2. Cloaking – Cloaking is when a website or web page is set up to show different content for a search engine spider than the human visitors. This is often done using server code such as PHP or ASP and usually detects that the visitor is a spider so gives them a page that is stuffed with keywords in an attempt to get higher rankings. The human visitor sees a different page which is often much more readable.  The problem is that this technique can get you banned from the results.

3. Doorway Pages – Doorway or gateway pages are similar to cloaking pages in that they are pages that are set-up for one keyword topic but then they take you to different content (usually some sort of sales page). These pages usually have little value in the way of content and have little to do with the rest of the site.

4. Redirect Pages – Another form of cloaking or doorway page, redirect pages are set up to rank high in the search engines but when you click on the page, it will take you to another page which is usually a sales page for a product or service. So, what you see isn’t what you get!

5. Linking to Bad Neighborhoods – Be careful who you link to because you can be found guilty by association. Unless you are an adult or gambling site do not link to adult sites, gambling sites and you should think very carefully about linking to “link farms” where the only purpose of the link farm is to present lists of links. You should also be careful not to link to sites that use any of the bad SEO methods talked about in this article.

6. Getting Links – Do not try to get too many links too quickly, this can trigger a flag at the search engines that you are trying to “game” the search engines.  Personally I would stay away from firms that offer to get you 100 links in the next 24  hours (or 1,000 links in the next 7 days), unless your page is exceptional it would be unlikely to get that number of links in such a short timescale.

7. Title Stacking – This is not used very often but is simply trying to give each page more than one title tag so you can use more titles and keywords to get higher rankings.   Apart from anything else this can confuse the search engines and not give you the results that  you are expecting in the search engine results.

8. Keyword Stuffing Meta Information – There are some SEO companies that will attempt to optimise a website by repeating a list of keywords in the page title, meta description and a comment field in the header section of the page.  This is not a good idea as if you are found to be doing this it could lead to the page being penalised or the entire site being banned.

9. Keyword Stuffing – Keyword stuffing or spamming is simply being too repetitive with your keywords as to the extent of your content not being sensible. For example if your keywords are dog food and your text reads something like this:

When your dog gets hungry be sure to feed them this delicious dog food because your dog will like this dog food. This dog food comes in an easy to open dog food can and contains lamb, rice, gravy and healthy ingredients that all the best dog food should have. So, when your dog is hungry for dog food, give them this dog food because this dog food is the best dog food to keep  your dog happy and healthy.

You can easily see why this kind of keyword stuffing should not be used, although it is obviously about dog food no one in their right mind would write a sentence like that and anyone reading the wording above would immediately go to another site.

10. Invisible Text – This is when you hide text, it can be done using several methods from using the same color text and background; making the text so small that it can not be read; hiding it behind an image; or using CSS to make it invisible or move it off the page . The invisible text is meant for the search engines and not for human visitors. This is done so you can stuff a lot more keywords on your page without wrecking your content. The search engines will discover this and they are likely to penalise you!

11. Automated Submission Services – Do not use automated submission services. They are against Google’s TOS and can get you banned (in fact if you can get links to your site in a natural manner there should be no need to submit  your site to the search engines at all).  In a similar vein you should not use automated tools to check your websites positions in the search engines.

A fuller list of guidelines for Google is at this page should you want to read them.

By being careful not to use these Black Hat SEO methods and being careful as well if you hire an SEO person to work on your site (because some of these things could be done without your knowledge) you reduce the risk of your website being banned or penalised by the search engines.