Now that you've learned about the most commonly used search engine optimization techniques, you may think that the goal of SEO is to figure out all the ways you can fill your website with text and tags that will snare the attention of search engines. In one sense, you would be correct in assuming this was the goal. After all, no one is likely to find your site in other ways, especially if you or your client cannot afford a major marketing campaign to advertise your domain name.
Search engine companies are more savvy than they used to be, however. Their reputations—and therefore their profits—depend on providing the best search results for their own visitors. If visitors are regularly "tricked" into visiting a site that is not relevant to their needs, one that is of poor quality, or one that is not trustworthy, they will simply start using another search engine.
Legitimate use of SEO strategies is often called White Hat optimization while unfair or dishonest methods are called Black Hat optimization. Search engine companies have begun "cracking down" on websites that use Black Hat methods to exploit, or take advantage of, the way search engines work to deliver more visitors to their sites. Search engine exploitation can take many forms. Here are the most common.
| Keyword Stuffing | Inserting keywords multiple times into page content, even when the extra words interfere with readability. |
| Excessive Linking | Including as many links as possible on a page to make it look more "authoritative" and relevant, even if the links aren't that useful. |
| Overloading Footers | Adding text references or links to every single page of the site into each page's footer, despite the fact that users might have trouble using the footer to navigate the site. |
| Cloaking | Detecting if a "visitor" is a real person or a search engine and delivering different pages to search engines and actual visitors, so as not to affect the usability of the visitor's experience while padding the search engine's page with keywords. |
Most search engines companies have developed the capability to detect these and other methods of padding search engine results. They have developed rules that they integrate into their algorithms so that if your website seems to be using these practices, it will be penalized and pushed far down in the search results list.
