Site Owners Forums - Webmaster Forums - Negative SEO Ranking Factors

Search engine optimisation is a multi-layered process. Unsurprisingly, sorting out the negative SEO practices on your site is every bit as important as implementing the positive one's. Many sites fall foul of the search engines by committing some of these common SEO faux pas; site cloaking, keyword stuffing, canonicalization and downtime of your web server. It is in your interest to make sure you don't commit these mistakes and to rectify them if you are.

Site cloaking is the process of presenting the search engine spiders a different page from the one that really exists, for the purposes of boosting that page's ranking. It is achieved by the use of various scripts and programs. It goes without saying that if you are cloaking your site, then you are probably aware that you are breaking search engine 'law'. If discovered, the penalties are an immediate blacklisting, which will cause your site to tumble down the rankings and in some cases disappear altogether. Quite simply, if you wish for your website to have a long and productive existence on the web, then don't go anywhere near website cloaking.