Top 10 Google Dont's - Things You Should Never Do for Search Engine Optimization

Don't like being found in Google? Here are some sure fired ways to lower your ranking and get the worst search engine results. These are the worst of the worst dirty tricks, and they can lower your Google ranking or just get you banned.

Getting page views at any cost is not a good tactic. It never works in the long run, even if it may work for a short while. Beware of any company that recommends you employ any of these techniques.

1. Cloaking

Designing your Web site so that search engines see one thing and visitors see another is called cloaking. This can be done with sneaky redirects or with programming, and it's strictly verboten.

Nobody likes to be tricked this way. If they're looking for a Web site on knitting, they'll be very ticked to end up on a Web site about horses.

Cloaking your Web site is a sure-fire way to get banned from Google.

. Duplicate Content

Spam sites sometimes try to collect page views by duplicating the same content on multiple pages.

Don't copy and paste large amounts of text from your own pages, and certainly don't violate copyright by copying content from elsewhere. Google has been known to ban sites that duplicate too much content.

This can occasionally cause problems, because some spamming Web site might be duplicating your content. If you find someone violating your copyright this way, you can let Google know.

3. Have a Robot Write Your Web Site

Just as it's a bad idea to duplicate content, it's a worse idea to get a machine to write your content for you. There are programs out there that duplicate the same content but make a few changes here and there. If Google catches you, and they're pretty good at catching this, you can kiss your page views goodbye.

Write your own content. That's as simple as it gets. Don't buy "instant AdSense" Web sites. If this really made lots of passive money, they wouldn't be selling them.

4. Add Keywords that Don't Relate to Your Content

Meta keywords aren't that important to Google anymore. However, when you list keywords, do list keywords that directly relate to your site, and don't repeat the same keyword multiple times. Spamming keywords by listing every word in the dictionary is a great way to have your ranking lowered in Google.

Likewise, don't use the trademarked names of products made by your competitors as keywords. At best it's a bad user experience, at worse it can get you sued by those competitors.

5. Link to Bad Neighborhoods

Google calls spamming sites bad neighborhoods, and linking to them is a great way to lower your PageRank.

Linking ordinarily would make you a good neighbor and a good citizen of the Internet. However, just because someone links to you does not obligate you to link back to them. Check out the Web site first, and make sure it is not a bad neighborhood.

How do you know it's a bad neighborhood? Check their PageRank and scan the Web site for any of the violations you see here.

6. Hide Text

Don't try to hide keywords by making the background color the same as the font color. This is called keyword stuffing or fontmatching. Google and other search engines are increasingly sophisticated at catching this, and they'll likely remove any offending Web sites from their search engine index.

Likewise, watch how small you make the text. In a variation of keyword stuffing, some people try to put teeny tiny text at the bottom of a page. It doesn't work.

7. Title Stacking

Don't try to add extra