Tricking Google is a No No

Let me repeat that again. SEO (search engine optimization) is not about tricking Google. In fact, trying to trick Google is the easiest and fastest way to de-optimize a site.

If you or your developer came up with a clever trick that you think will trick Google to give you a higher ranking than you would normally deserve, think very carefully before doing it.

Is this technique something that a typical web designer or coder would do? Would doing this enhance the user experience? If the answer is no, then why are you doing it?

If the answer to that last question is, "because I want to trick Google by intentionally feeding it information that I believe will give me higher ranking in the search results page", then do not do it.

No doubt, others have though of that idea already and have tried it and failed. You know that they had failed because for the most part the results that you see on Google's search engine results page (SERP) is fairly accurate. We rarely see a website that got listed higher up than it deserved. We rarely see a website with low relevancy listed high up in the search results. We rarely see a website that appears too high in the search result due to its manipulations and tricks.

And this is the way Google and users want it. Google do not want websites to be intentionally deceiving its ranking algorithm. It wants to rank site based on the merits of their content.

Techniques that intentionally try to deceive Google are known at black hat techniques. The term "black hat" originates from the references to old cowboy movies when the villain cowboy always wears a black hat.

Conversely, "white hat" techniques are legitimate ways to optimize (but not trick) Google's search engine ranking of your site. These techniques tend to enhance the user experience as well.

Google attracts some of the top software engineers; because, well it's Google and people want to work for them. In any case, surely they will be able to detect the use of black hat techniques. Some of those black hat unethical techniques include "keyword stuffing", "hidden text", "cloaking", and other.

Keyword stuffing is when you put excessive keywords into the content and meta tag that would be un-natural. Hidden text when you have text of the same color as the background color such that it is invisible to users but visible to search engine. This is an attempt to intentionally feed specific terms to the search engine. Cloaking is similar except that it attempts to feed entire cloaked pages to search engine. Depending on whether the page is being requested by a human or a bot, a different page is rendered.

In February 2006, Germany's BMW.de website was detected by Google to have used cloaking. The penalty was severe. The site was completely removed from the Google index. Its page rank became zero. The company did apologize and corrected the problem, and Google re-instated them. This is not the only case of Google banning a site; surely there have been many others. This is just one of the more famous cases that had been talked about in the SEO circles.

In short, do not try to deceive Google. It is not worth it. And that is not what SEO is about.