Illegal SEO Techniques to Avoid

1. Link Farms

Also known as Spamexing or Spamdexing.

I hate link farms for 2 reasons.

1. Link farms are a waste of everyones time and money Spamdexing providing bogus or junk results
2. A link farm is a series of websites created solely for housing gratuitous links that point to a collection of websites. It can also be a network of websites interlinking with each other.

These types of websites are one of the many types Google and major search engines consider illegal in their eyes. The reason is because they attempt at achieving higher rankings for websites that haven’t earned those rankings through good content and overall quality.

As a strategy, utilizing link farms, or spamdexing a search engine is not only highly dangerous for the firm doing it but any site owner linking to or from your site. YOUR site could have the best content and maybe not the minute your SEO consultant or you use this technique... but at some point in the future your website will more than likely be penalized or banned. Because the HUGE brained engines figure this. If you have great content why would you resort to sneaky tactics designed to trick them.

How to Guard Against It:
When an SEO professional tells you that he or she will secure incoming links for you, ask them to tell you specifically how they will do so. The correct answer is that they will target specific, pre-existing and established websites to gain an incoming link from them to you (in most cases without having to link back to them).

1 chance in 100 a professional is going to tell you that they'll build hundreds or thousands of pages across a range of domains linking back to your website. YOU SAY NO I am NOT working with you. BECAUSE chance are they will severely damage or even cripple your site.

Regularly search your domain name in the major search engines using the following in google site: yourdomain.com

Check out just what sites are pointing to yours. Anything out of the ordinary, is a bad thing. For example websites whose domains are extremely long, jibberish (lots of numbers and random or inappropriate words) or pages that are simply long lists of links. Contact your SEO and get him/her to remove them from these pages. Don't even worry about how they appeared there in the first place. JUST get rid of them.

A point to note some domains are naturally long

2.Gateway or Doorway Pages

Also known as Advertising Pages, Jump Pages, Gateway Pages, etc.

Gateway Pages are basically a landing page solely designed for search engine use. 99 out of a 100 you the human visitor don't even see it.

Often what is used is a redirect script that automatically points the visitor to another page on the website without the human visitor ever knowing about the gateway page. AKA known as cloaking, defined as an illegal practice by Google and other search engines. This is used by affiliate marketers mostly used protect their commissions.

Search engines only like one kind of land page and that is the kind you and I like. Something that is a decent read is readable and not stuffed full of junk. Something like an article or story that humans read and enjoy. where you are not tricked by being redirected to other websites or into clicking 1 or more bogus links.

How you Guard Against It: Always ensure you understand what kind of pages exactly are being put on your website. Ensure you look at all of them. Ask your SEO straight up if any of the pages automatically redirect to another page. If the answer is yes, then drop them because they're breaking the rules. To which they are usually well aware of it. We recommend against you working with any such company or individual.

No matter what they use Java, php whatever, if it redirects remove it, because it's probably not acceptable to Google. Unless you want to be sand boxed by the big G and other search engines. If it's a new trick, they may not have found it out yet. BUT you will find out quick enough if your site vanishes from the results.

The only tactic I used on this page is reworded the template and made an image so as not to de grade your user experience. If you view the source of this page you will see what I mean just under this paragraph.