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by: Joe.Maelstrom
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Illegible text is a classic black hat SEO trick. Setting a font size too small for humans to read, coloring text to match or blend with the page background, or hiding it behind a div block or floating image are all considered attempts to trick search engines, and pages that use these methods excessively are penalized. (Legitimate uses of hidden text, such as CSS navigation that hides descriptive text until the reader mouses over a link, are not penalized.) To avoid being penalized for unreadable text, make sure all the text on your pages is large enough to be easily legible, colored to contrast with the background, and not inadvertently hidden by another page element.
Keyword stuffing is another common black hat SEO technique, one users find even more irritating because the "stuffed" keywords clutter the page. The webmaster fills the page body and title with keywords, which might or might not be relevant to the page. Sometimes the keyword meta tag is also stuffed with keywords, though this is such an ancient SEO technique that most search engines completely ignore they keyword meta tag. To avoid a penalty for keyword stuffing, use good SEO to write natural sounding titles for your pages, and do not add any text to a page that does not apply to the pages topic.
A more sophisticated variant of keyword stuffing is spreading keywords through the pages body text instead of lumping them together in a single block. Search engines scan for this SEO trick by calculating each pages keyword density and penalizing pages whose density falls above a target range. Because of the eternal nature of spammers, the target density has been sliding ever lower for the past several years. To avoid penalties for having a poor keyword density, keep track of the currently desirable density via webmaster forums, and rewrite pages if their keyword density is too high.
Webmasters with a little more technical skill use "doorway pages" to show specially optimized pages to search engines, instead of showing them the less optimized pages that human viewers see. Doorway pages are strongly penalized. Avoiding a penalty for having a doorway page is simple: Do not redirect search engine spiders to special pages designed just for them.
If you find that you have accidentally used one of these black hat SEO techniques, use good SEO to remedy the mistake, and watch for any inadvertent misuse of SEO techniques in the future. In the long run, less flashy white hat SEO techniques will drive your page farther than any black hat SEO trick.
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