While there are dozens of great ways to optimize your site for search engine spiders, there are just as many techniques you may have heard promoted or discussed which should absolutely be avoided at all costs - always. This document describes a few of the techniques you should NOT utilize or implement.

Please note that many of these techniques can directly lead to your site being banned from the major search engines, as per their Terms of Service.

Hidden Text
Hidden text refers to text that is viewable in the source code of a page, but not viewable to a human looking at the page in a web browser. This can be acheived through CSS by setting "display:none;" for a block element's style, by making the text the same color as the background color, by positioning the text off screen in some fashion, or by positioning other block elements over top of the text (i.e. positioning an image absolutely with a higher z-index effectively drawing the image overtop of the text).

Search engine's don't like it when you try to fool them, and most search engines can catch hidden text quite easily. This is a big no-no that (1) you are likely to be caught if you do, and (2) will likely get your site penalized.

Keyword Stuffing
This term refers to the practice of taking a lot of keywords, ones that your site does rank well for or that you wish for your site to rank well for, and putting them in various attributes in the page. Commonly, this refers to taking a huge chunk of keywords and placing them inside image alt attributes. Sometimes the keywords may be put inside the noscript tag (which is intended to display an alternate version of a site if javascript is disabled, which it typically is for spiders). However this method is implemented, you are not generating your page for a human, but for a spider if you attempt to do any of these things, and most search engines will penalize you for doing so if found out.

Duplicate Content
Sometimes this is done on purpose, and sometimes it isn't. Many times there are multiple links that point to the same page on your site. Take for example in Invision Power Board - you can access a topic by

index.php?showtopic=3
index.php?act=SC&tid=3

This is purely an example, and search engines rate this differently for dynamic content and static content - but if you have multiple urls that point to the same content, it is given a duplicate penalty. Additionally, if you have 50% ranking for one of the pages and 50% for another, this is most definitely worse than 100% for one of those pages.

When this technique is applied unethically, a person may create several sites with the same content hoping for all sites to acheive top spots so that (one of) the sites is always landed upon for those keyword searches. Another way this can be applied unethically is to steal someone else's site (by downloading it from their browser, or just copying direct portions of someone else's site) which is not only wrong, but illegal. Search engine's watch closely for duplicate content, and if it is done on purpose, or unethically, you will be penalized - usually this includes removing the duplicates from their caches, and many times removing the original.

Doorway Pages / Gateway Pages
These are the same thing, and actually have many other similar terms. This refers to the practice of having a landing page when an visitor is coming into your site - the landing page is intended to be read by spiders, and has a lot of keywords and keyphrases that should be indexed by the spiders, however the user never sees this page. Instead the user is redirected using obfuscated javascript to another page either very quickly, or immediately. The idea is the search engines will index the page and it will rank well, so it will be listed at the top of search engine results, however the users clicking to the page will be sent somewhere else of the person's choice.

This is not only against search engine guidelines and terms of service, it is annoying to the user, and reduces relevancy of result listings search engines provide. Search engines hate this, and you will be penalized if found out. Spider technology will continue advancing, and is it does, spiders will be able to figure out more of the ways this technique is employed, so watch out if someone recommends you do this - you will be setting yourself up for a fall.

Automated Search Engine Queries
Automated search engine queries are queries sent to search engines to pull back results, usually to check your status or rank for keywords you specify. This is expressely forbidden by most search engines, and instead you are provided tools to use at your disposal to check your positioning. Google, for example, provides it's webmaster tools where your rankings for specific keywords are displayed.

There is no real reason to do this, and it will most certainly get you in trouble, so avoid automated queries .

Cloaking
Cloaking refers to presenting different content to humans rather than spiders. This is another activity expressely forbidden, and one that will you get you banned if you are found out. There are borderline practices that may or may not be seen as cloaking, and you have to make the best decision you can when presented with these practices. An example in Invision Power Board is the practice of forcing a skin upon spiders. In my opinion - if the skin is publicly accessible to users, then this is not cloaking - it is presetting a default skin to a user that is unable to select their own. However if the skin is completely hidden to everyone but spiders, this may fall under the umbrella of presenting different content to spiders over humans.

You will have to make the decisions as to whether any practices you employ can be seen as "cloaking" attempts - just be sure you do everything possible to ensure they are not.

Linking to "Bad" sites
Search engines realize you cannot control who links to you, and as such you are generally not penalized if you are linked to from a "bad" site - however you DO control who YOU link to. If you link to a site that the search engines do not like (for example, one which violates any of these guidelines, or one which installs malware of some sort) you WILL be penalized for that link. Be careful who you link to, because it shows spiders (and humans!) your morales, and your character.

Installing malware of any sort
This includes viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, and so on. You will be instantly removed from search engine result listings if a search engine spider discovers your site is doing this. I have seen it happen, multiple times.

Resubmitting your site multiple times / Automated submissions
While this is debatable, there is a general consensus that spamming a search engine is frowned upon. After all, there are millions of sites on the internet the spiders need to crawl - they can't spend every minute on your site, especially if nothing has changed, and they've already crawled it. Submit your site once - maybe submit a couple pages even. If the search engine supports it, feel free to submit a sitemap (such as a Google Sitemap) which will allow the search engine access to many pages, and which you can constantly update to notify Google of the new links. But do NOT resubmit your site to search engine's multiple times, and do not use automated software to submit your site to multiple search engines. While this last action is not necessarily "bad", most search engines frown upon it as well, and recommend that you manually submit your site to their forms.

Relying upon meta tags
While this practice will not penalize you, it will also ensure you go nowhere fast. Meta tags lost their effectiveness years ago when search engines realized how many people abused them. The description tag is sometimes used to generate the little blurb about the page on a search engine results page, but not when determining the page's value. The title tag is used for the title of the page in the browser, as well as in the search engine results listing, so it is important to create as well - but don't expect meta tags to increase (or lower for that matter) your search engine results position.

Purchasing links
The pratice of paying another site to link to yours is very popular, due to it's effectiveness currently, however it is also considered a negative activity, and can lead to a lower ranking for your site for those links, and alltogether banning of your site from the search engine results listing if the search engine decides to do so. Google, for example, has an entire division dedicated to quality assurance, and part of their job is to look for paid links. Don't pay someone else to link to your site - look for sites that have similar content where you can BOTH gain something out of the deal, and link to each other because your users may find each other's site interesting. Not because you think it will bring your page rank up.

Reciprocal Linking / Swapping Links
Do not reciprocate links or swap links with unrelated sites purely for page rank or to build up your inbound links. The sites that you link to, and that link to you, should be directly related in some way that your visitors may deem valuable. You link to sites so that your users may find those sites, and benefit - not so search engines will find those sites and drive up their value. This is easily detectable and heavily frowned upon. Don't do it.

Use of session ids in your urls
While session ids are necessary to track sessions typically, if a search engine indexes a page with a session id one day, then visits again the next day and has a different session id this time, it is going to index that page separately from the first (even if it is the exact same page) because the url is different. This leads back to the duplicate content advisory above, and should be avoided.

Note: IPB already protects against this if it detects the visitor is a spider.


At the end of the day, you should be building your site for your human visitors, and only then optimizing it to make it easier for search engines to index and crawl. If you build your site around search engines from the ground up, you are not focusing on the wrong audience, and will likely lead down one of the bad practice paths discussed above.