By Wolfgang Jaegel and Gregory Smyth
If you haven’t read Part I of our series on the don’ts of SEO, please go to Part I here
Cloaking in SEO and Why It Violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Cloaking, also known as “stealth”, is a technique that serves one set of information to search engine spiders while displaying a different set of information to human visitors on the website. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. Cloaking is a form of doorway page technique. This method is considered a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can result in manual penalties or removal from the index.
Keyword Stuffing and the Risks of Over-Optimization
At one time, search engines were limited to sorting and ranking sites based on the number of keywords found on those documents. That limitation led webmasters to put keywords everywhere they possibly could. Keyword stuffing is an unethical search engine optimization technique. It occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in the content. This repetition of words in meta tags is one reason why search engines stopped valuing the “keywords” meta tag many years ago. Google is known to penalize sites using this technique by lowering their rankings or even removing them from results.
Hidden Text Techniques and Why They Are Penalized by Search Engines
It is amazing that some webmasters and even SEO firms continue to use hidden text as a technique. Hiding text out of view of the visitor is done in many ways. Text is colored in the same shade as the background thus rendering it invisible to human visitors but not to search spiders, Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) “Z” which positions text “behind” an image and therefore out of view of the visitor or using CSS absolute positioning to position text very far from the page center are all common techniques used to hide text. Today, most hidden text techniques are easily detected by modern search engines, and pages using them are devalued or penalized.
Hidden Tags and the Dangers of Keyword Stuffing in HTML Tags
There are several different sorts of tags used to perform a variety of functions, for example, comment tags, style tags, alt tags, noframes tags, and http-equiv tags. The “alt tag”, for example, is used by screen readers for accessibility and provides context for search engines. Inserting keywords into these tags can be very helpful if used with reason, but many webmasters and SEO firms continue to improperly stuff them with irrelevant keywords. This can lead to a drop in rankings or even the banning of the website.
Meta Tags in Modern SEO: What Still Matters and What Doesn’t
Most meta tags are not relevant today. The unethical part is that some SEO firms charge for the creation and insertion of meta tags as if it were the primary optimization technique. In modern SEO, the description tag is still important for click-through rates in search results, while the keywords tag is no longer used at all by major search engines. Relevant robots.txt files and structured data markup (schema.org) are now far more valuable. All other identifying or clarifying information should be visible on a contact page or included in each page’s footer.
Misuse of Social Media and User-Generated Content for SEO Spam
What used to be called misuse of “Web 2.0” formats (like wikis, early social networking, or tagging) has today shifted to the misuse of social platforms, comment sections, and user-generated content. Examples include spammy posts in online forums, fake profiles on social media, or irrelevant comments with backlinks. The instant live-to-web nature of these platforms still provides an opportunity for abuse, but modern algorithms and platform moderation quickly filter out these techniques.
Google’s Algorithm Updates and the Fight Against Black Hat SEO
Fortunately for all ethical and professional SEO firms, Google’s ongoing algorithm updates, such as Penguin, Panda, Helpful Content Updates, and SpamBrain AI-based systems, are highly advanced in detecting manipulative SEO practices. This makes following ethical SEO not only the right approach, but the only sustainable way to build visibility online.
