Hidden text and links

Hidden text and links are easily spotted by search engines and are not beneficial to your website. Websites can be removed from the Google index for using this method of deception.

Avoid sneaky redirects

Sneaky redirects are typically someone trying to outsmart Google (probably a bad idea). In the Google help documentation it says this about sneaky redirects…

“For instance, placing different text in JavaScript than in a noscript tag violates our Webmaster Guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the JavaScript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the Webmaster Guidelines to embed a link in JavaScript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees.”

Avoid cloaking techniques

Cloaking, luckily for us, has been defined well by Google. The Google webmaster help pages explicitly defines cloaking for us…

“the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engine robots”

Don’t participate in link schemes

Link scheme – when you link somewhere or are linked to for perceived search or monetary benefits rather than usefulness to people.

For us to consider what a link scheme is it would be a good idea to consider what is not a link scheme….

Avoid using automatically generated content

If your webpage is like the one shown in the image, you are not providing any original content whatsoever. While you might think you are providing a user with information, you are not adding any value to the information you are showing and Google will not rank you very high because it knows that the information is not original.