4 Things The Search Engines Hate

July 29, 2004



1. Irrelevant links.

Have you ever heard of link farms? There are businesses that will create backend pages filled with links. Links will raise your ranking tremendously. A few years ago businesses set up practice to fill your website with links to raise you in the rankings. The search engines have now caught on, and frown upon this method.



2. Irrelevant keywords.

Only use keywords relevant to the text on your site. Especially in your meta tags and descriptions. Adding keywords that may be in your marketing plan, but have nothing to do with the text in your website may end up penalizing you.



3. Mega keywords.

When you list keywords, do you list everything you can think of, in every combination possible? Many designers will still tell you to list hundreds of keywords. This is not the case. Instead, focus on a select few words that are relevant to your website.



4. Hidden keyword pages.

Never create hidden pages on your website who’s sole purpose is to have listed strings of text related to your keywords, or simply rows and rows or keyword text. In the past, this was an easy way of getting higher rankings. Today search engines may drop you from their listing if they catch these hidden pages.

Lori Osterberg