Forbidden Methods

In attempting to get top positions in search engines, you might try all sorts of things and sometimes take to desperate measures.

These desperate measures instead of improving the sites search engine position, often diminish it and sometimes lead to the site getting altogether banned from the search engine indexes.

So far in this web promotion guide we have focused in detail about steps you must take and also educated you on the factors that often influence search engine rankings. This section and its sub pages are about steps you must never resort to in order to get into or attain good positions on search engines. Major Forbidden Methods:

Keyword stuffing

Cloaking

Hidden text

Link building
Remember that a position in the Google or Yahoo is critical but no position is suicidal. Hence whether you attain good positions or not, never resort to ways that enrage search engines. Also, keep in mind that you are creating pages and sites not for the engines but for the people, your visitors.

While it is true that you are creating sites for your visitors, it is also true that you have to keep search engines in mind and take steps that would please them. There is no point in creating a site that no one can find using search engines. The key is in keeping the right balance. Your visitor must find your site useful and at the same time search engines must find the site worth being given top ranks.

As we emphasized throughout this guide, focus on the following things when you are creating site.

  • Content – Good quality and quantity of content in the subject area of your site remains one of the most important search engine rank influencing factors.
  • Site structure, hierarchy – How folders, files, hyperlinks are organized and named.
  • Title tag – Title of the page. Make concise and relevant title. Move the name of the site and parent sections information towards end of title in all sub pages and write the particular pages particulars in the beginning of the title.
  • Inbound links from reputed sites – Quality and quantity of sites linking to you.
  • Appropriate use of keyword or key-phrase on the page.
  • Grammar, spelling, accessibility of the page by engine’s robots, anchor tag, file type, etc.
  • Getting listed under directories.
    There can be thousands of other factors that influence positively your web site ranking. Important factors have been most comprehensively discussed in the previous portions of this guide.

There is one sentence in webmaster guidelines by Google under “Quality Guidelines – Basic principles” that especially caught our interest. It says that “Make pages for users, not for search engines”.

In this area of the guide we are focusing on things you must never do on your site as part of your effort to get high ranks for your site.

These are the steps that you or your webmaster must never resort to in an effort to improve your search engine rankings.

Next: Keyword Stuffing

Quotable Quotes:

“Advice tells you much about the person giving it.”