Five Dangerous SEO Strategies to Avoid

By kimberly • on December 15, 2009 • Filed under: SEO

I am amazed that some seo’s, designers, and developers use shady tactics to rank in the search engines or try to drive traffic to their websites. I tested these techniques in the early days of marketing online and long before anyone, even Google, considered them blackhat seo methods. Many of these seo strategies work, and work very well. That is, until you get slammed by Google as a spammer.

There are plenty of “approved” SEO methods that you do not need to break the rules.

1. Hidden Content

Top of the list of black hat SEO techniques is hidden content. Hidden

content comes in many forms, but the basic principle is that within the

code for the site there will be content stuffed with keywords, this content

will not be visible to the end user of the site.

One way of doing this is by using comment tags.

Comment tags look like this;

The real purpose of comment tags is for developers/webmasters to add in

useful reminders within their code explaining what that piece of code does.

Here’s an example of the comment tag being used correctly,

Here’s an example of a comment tag being used Blackhat in a bid to promote a

hypothetical page targeting search engine optimization.

company, spamming search engines –>

Another popular way of hiding content is the use of the

Here’s an example of the

Other HMTL tags misused in similar ways include the