If you are trying to outsmart Google, here's what you are up against:

Google has the best programmers in the world and treats them like they are. Can you imagine a company that expects employees to spend one day of the week working on personal projects. No wonder the best work for Google.

And imagine being one of the top Microsoft programmers getting hired away by Google. There was a little matter of a non-compete clause that might force a legal battle. The employment contract said that if the employee was unable to work for Google during that first year because of it, the employee would still get paid $1,000,000. And that's for doing nothing!

Ok, so Google hires the best. What's funny is the number of webmasters who think they are smarter than Google's programmers. And there are thousands of them. SEO tricks are tried all the time to try to outsmart them. The tricks may work for a little while but eventually Google changes the rules and catches them. Is a few months of glory worth getting banned?

Good SEO takes thoughtful work. It case you are thinking of taking a short cut, here is a list of things that will come back to bite you. Ignore this list and you won't have to worry about anyone finding your web site.

Comment spamming

This is a technique where comments are added to blogs that link back to spammer's web site. The comments do not contribute to the subject of the blog. Their only purpose is to add a link back to the contributor's web site.

In one instance, a webmaster purchased some linking software that promised high rankings without any negative side effects. The software added 3,000 comments to blogs and the webmaster's site was quickly banned by Google. Rather short sighted in my opinion.

Software doesn't determine the value of links to your site. That's your job. If a link doesn't come from a high-value site related to the topic of your site, it has no ranking value. A better method is to ask yourself if the link would bring the kind of traffic you want for your site. If the answer is no, you don't need the link.

Google wants to see "natural" linking. This is a slow and steady process where other webmasters see value in your site and want to link to it without being asked. Suddenly adding large numbers of links to your site is a big tip off that you are trying to cheat the system with "unnatural" linking. This could be from automated systems as well as buying links. To make it even more difficult to benefit from this, Google's Jagger update is also looking at the age of links. You may not get full value for the links for as long as 4 to 6 months. That certainly makes buying links a very expensive proposition.

Hidden text

While you may be able to hide things from your visitors, don't count on hiding things from Google. I recently worked on a site that was banned by Google. The webmaster had tried to use CSS to hide link spamming. One class of font was actually called "stealth" because it made text invisible to visitors. Use your brain. If you are going to hide something, don't tell the world about it.

Google treats web sites very harshly when they try to present things to their visitors that are different than what Google sees. If you make white text on a white background, Google knows HTML and can figure that out. And don't try to make the font only one pixel high. Remember, these are the smartest programmers in the world you are trying to fool.

Hidden links / Link spamming

Another problem I found with this banned site was hidden links and link spamming. 75% of the content of his pages were links that had no text to them. They were certainly invisible. You couldn't click on them. And links were placed inside of links inside of links. Do you really think having a hundred links to yourself is going to increase your rankings?

And then there were these pages full of links being linked to by other pages full of links. Most of the pages of the site were nothing but link pages. This is an example of link spamming, hundreds of repeating links.

Redirects

A redirect is where you send a visitor to another page you want them to see instead of the one they came to. This may be done as a meta-refresh so the original page is never seen. The theory is that the page you don't see will get indexed and increase your rankings. Again, Google can read HTML.

Cloaking

A more sophisticated form of redirect is cloaking. When the web server sees a visit from Googlebot (that Google's indexing robot), it presents a different page than what a visitor would see. Some webmasters will present a different page for each search engine.

Google's engineers are familiar with this technique. Googlebot doesn't always announce itself or come from the same IP address. Eventually, you'll get caught - and then banned, maybe by more than one search engine.

Doorway pages

These are special pages built for search engines to see before they enter your site. The pages are usually so packed with keywords that they could kill someone with boredom if they were to actually read them.

Doorway pages are often placed on one-page web sites using a different, keyword-filled domain name. Any links take you to the destination web site. Somehow, the link is supposed to increase link popularity. And the search engine is supposed to munch on so many keywords that your site can't help but rank well. You source for this technique probably failed to mention that link popularity died with the Florida update back in November, 2003.

Duplicate content / Multiple domains

In reaction to the huge number of affiliate sites using duplicate content, Google is penalizing or dropping those kinds of sites. Another problem has been with scraper sites, those using programming to gather content from other sites. Depending on the amount of duplication, you could have pages depreciated in value, penalized, or dropped entirely.

With search engines, content is king. You can add that "original" content is king.

Multiple domains can cause the same problem. Some webmasters have registered other domains containing keywords and pointed or forwarded them to the main site. To search engines, this appears as duplicate content. If you parked a domain on your site, don't have anything linking to those parked domains.

Excessive linking

This is where you have link pages with many, many links pointing to other web sites. Some webmasters do this to create portals or directories where they hope to gain income from Google's Adsense program. There are two problems with this. Your PageRank is divided by the number of links you have on a page. More links means they have less value. Having more than 100 links on a page also makes you look like a link farm and will seriously effect your rankings.

Linking to a bad neighborhood

Linking to a link farm or site that has been banned can also get your site banned because that associates your site with a bad neighborhood. Be really careful when someone contacts you wanting to exchange links. Check out the site and make sure they do not belong to a bad neighborhood.

Unscrupulous companies will often make fraudulent claims on how they will get you a top ranking on the search engines. Part of their offer requires that you link back to them. If they have been banned for their bad behavior, linking to them will get you in trouble as well.

Alt tag spamming

As you can tell, I'm getting a little desperate to get 10 items. Alt tag spamming may or may not get you banned. It's really stupid and I think it should.

Alt tags are meant to describe the subject of a picture. They can help the visually impaired and those surfing with graphics turned off. At one time, keywords found in those alt tags would help rankings. But like all things where it is easy to cheat, this is no long effective. However, I still see alt tags filled with hundreds of spammed keywords.

Imagine doing a mouseover and seeing hundreds of words appear in the popup label. These are words that are unrelated to the subject of the page or those that are repeated over and over again. It really makes you as a webmaster look bad. And you look bad to the search engines as well. It's pretty easy to see that you are trying to cheat your way to the top and you'll probably get penalized for it.

Keep Your Nose Clean