Don’t do anything to try to fool a search engine into boosting your site’s search rankings. That’s because even if it works for a while, once you’re found out you’ll get dumped from its search results, perhaps permanently. There was a time, for example, when Web designers tried to spoof the search engines by packing keywords onto pages as black text on a black background invisible to the human eye. The search engines discovered the ruse and a lot of sites disappeared from search results. The same thing happened with “link farms” – sites that were linking to each other for no purpose other than to build search traffic.
- Don’t keyword pack. That means no adding dozens of keywords, or repeating keywords, or adding irrelevant keywords like “Britney Spears” (unless, of course, you’re actually writing about Britney Spears!). We meant what we said above – you’ll only hurt yourself in the end.
- Don’t add fake pages. They might seem to bolster your ranking, but ultimately you’ll be punished by the search engines.