Admittedly, search engine optimization “manipulates” SERPs in a way by optimizing websites, but there are certain practices that push the limit, and they are considered bad. These so called black-hat techniques tend to spam, defeating the purpose of providing relevant information and are more focused on getting the top spots. Here is a list of bad SEO practices that you definitely avoid if you want to stay in the good graces of major search engines.

Expired domains

Even when the rights to use them have already expired, these domains still come with considerable traffic; hence, the higher page rank. Some people buy these expired domains, throw in a lot of repetitive content in them and link them to their other websites so they can ride on the popularity of the domain. This is bad because you’re going to mislead users into thinking that they are going to find the information they need in the domain when in fact, there’s a whole new and different content on it altogether.

Spamming comments

You go around the internet leaving comments in blogs, guestbooks and such. Your comments are peppered to the brim with keywords and links to your site. This annoys many legitimate forums and blogs, so much so that most have already crafted guidelines and banned posting links on comments to keep the spammers at bay.

Invisible text

Another one of the more popular bad SEO practices includes inserting keywords in white text over a white background as a way to attract the search engine spiders. Some may also embed keywords in unseen areas where crawlers are still known to frequent. Such practice can get you banned from Google and other search engines so you don’t want to fall into the temptation of diong it on your site.

Keyword stuffing

Search engines are committed to providing quality and relevant content to their users but are still highly reliant on keywords to make this possible. When a page contains a certain level of keyword density, they tend to tag it as relevant regardless of the content. To ensure a decent placement, some websites come stuffed with keywords and without coherent or even informative content. For a while, they got what they were aiming for but these days, search engines are beginning to be wiser about such practices.

Cloaking

Cloaking is another one of the bad SEO practices that is still quite prevalent even to this day. It entails creating two different types of content: one that is visible to human users and another one that only crawlers, robots and spiders can see. It’s essentially misleading both users and crawlers on the actual purpose of your website.