The Internet is a highly competitive market. Having a website is like running a business even if your website does not offer products or services. Even if you only have a small blog and you want to share your thoughts and opinions with others, you still need to market your website so that it will be seen by other Internet users. SEO (search engine optimization) rests in the heart of website marketing. SEO is the act of making your website search engine friendly in order for the search engines to recognize your website as important.
As with any industry out there, there are ethical and unethical ways to optimize your website and make it search engine friendly. Unethical SEO hinges on a website having unfair advantages over other websites by being optimized in ways that are not highly regarded in the industry.
Some of the unethical tactics which are used include; cloaking, using the keywords too many times on the website, doorway pages, spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose and spamming the search engines submission process.
Looking at keywords for an example, how could using keywords be unethical? Using keywords in a proper manner are not unethical and matter of fact, they are vital to the success of your website. However, if you use keywords too many times on your website, the search engines view this as a desperate attempt to gain search engine rankings. If you have ever visited a website where the text just read as the same word over and over again, you know what I mean.
Why would I mention spelling keywords incorrectly on purpose? Those who use unethical SEO may have text on their website which resembles popular brand names of items or misspelled names of other businesses. For example, they may have the brand “Samsung Television” misspelled as “Samsun Television”. This is done in hopes that when a user is searching for the term spelled correctly, the website with the misspelled word may show up near the top of the results. Or it is done in hopes that the user will misspell the term when they search for it.
Unethical SEO tactics will hurt your website. Most search engines are smart enough to realize when a website is using unethical SEO tactics and it will either penalize the site or ban it all together. Search engines view unethical SEO as spam and they do not put up with it.