In days gone by "cheating" was a legitimate technique to get your website into top position at Google, MSN, and Yahoo! Today it's a quick ticket to getting your website blacklisted!

Here are a list of techniques or tricks commonly associated with manipulating the search engines:

Doorway Pages

Cloaking (showing substantially different content to crawlers than to users)

False Redirects (redirects are bad in any case)

Keyword Stuffing

Hidden Text

Hidden Links

Pages Loaded With Irrelevant Words

Duplicated Content Across Multiple Pages (or even websites!)

Misspelling of Well-Known Websites

Link Farms

Anything or Any Activity Designed to Trick Search Engines

Anything or Any Activity Designed to Manipulate Search Engine Results

The bottom line is: follow the guidelines established by each of the search engines and use "best practices". Find the weak link in your competitors search engine optimization strategy (because they have them) and capitalize on it.

Google http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35770

MSN http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Yahoo! http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

I always welcome your feedback, general discussion, or questions. Click on the Live Support button below for my private chat, drop me a line at chris@bookmoreweddings.com, or use the feedback form below. Thank you.

Chris Jaeger