I know meeting your
SEO goals can be challenging and sometimes even frustrating but there is no excuse to apply sketchy, unethical and illegal strategies to gain an upper hand in the race. Sometimes we knowingly commit to black hat SEO while sometimes we are simply victims of ignorance. Well, for the benefit of both, I am listing below a few areas you must tread with caution.
1) Link commerce: Selling or buying of links are considered absolutely unethical by search engines like Google and if a website is found doing this, it can lose its position or get penalized. The quantity and quality of links can raise a website�s visibility tremendously.
2) Link exchange: Similar to above only no transfer of money takes place. They�re typically done to impart PageRank artificially and Google penalizes such sites.
3) Doorway passages: When pages are created to channelize or take users from one page to another, its is a doorway page. Such pages considered unethical and a penalty waits those sites using such techniques.
4) Duplicate content: Content that mirrors content found elsewhere in the website is termed as duplicate content. This will diminish value and rank of a page dramatically.
5) Keyword stuffing: Even though keyword usage must be appropriate and look natural within the content, there are times when content developers get carried away and stuff their content with keywords for the sake of SEO. In such cases the results have an opposite effect and hence it is advised that keyword usage be natural and not forceful.