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Designing your Web site so that search engines see one thing and visitors see another is called cloaking. This can be done with sneaky redirects or with programming, and it's strictly verboten.

Nobody likes to be tricked this way. If they're looking for a Web site on knitting, they'll be very ticked to end up on a Web site about horses.

Cloaking your Web site is a sure-fire way to get banned from Google.

Learn more about cloaking from the About Guide to Web Design.

Spam sites sometimes try to collect page views by duplicating the same content on multiple pages.

Don't copy and paste large amounts of text from your own pages, and certainly don't violate copyright by copying content from elsewhere. Google has been known to ban sites that duplicate too much content.

This can occasionally cause problems, because some spamming Web site might be duplicating your content. If you find someone violating your copyright this way, you can let Google know.

Just as it's a bad idea to duplicate content, it's a worse idea to get a machine to write your content for you. There are programs out there that duplicate the same content but make a few changes here and there. If Google catches you, and they're pretty good at catching this, you can kiss your page views goodbye.

Write your own content. That's as simple as it gets. Don't buy "instant AdSense" Web sites. If this really made lots of passive money, they wouldn't be selling them.

Meta keywords aren't that important to Google anymore. However, when you list keywords, do list keywords that directly relate to your site, and don't repeat the same keyword multiple times. Spamming keywords by listing every word in the dictionary is a great way to have your ranking lowered in Google.

Likewise, don't use the trademarked names of products made by your competitors as keywords. At best it's a bad user experience, at worse it can get you sued by those competitors.

Google calls spamming sites bad neighborhoods, and linking to them is a great way to lower your PageRank.

Linking ordinarily would make you a good neighbor and a good citizen of the Internet. However, just because someone links to you does not obligate you to link back to them. Check out the Web site first, and make sure it is not a bad neighborhood.

How do you know it's a bad neighborhood? Check their PageRank and scan the Web site for any of the violations you see here.

Don't try to hide keywords by making the background color the same as the font color. This is called keyword stuffing or fontmatching. Google and other search engines are increasingly sophisticated at catching this, and they'll likely remove any offending Web sites from their search engine index.

Likewise, watch how small you make the text. In a variation of keyword stuffing, some people try to put teeny tiny text at the bottom of a page. It doesn't work.

Don't try to add extra <title> tags for more keywords. This cousin of keyword stuffing is called title stacking, and it won't win you any friends at Google.

One title per page, please, although you may separate that title with a dash to hit a few more keywords that do relate to your content, such as "Pie Crust Recipe - Homemade Pastry Dough."

If your site is distributing a virus, trojan, or other badware, Google's going to remove you from their index for the public good. This should be a no-brainer.

Double check any software you agree to distribute to make sure it isn't harmful, and make sure your server is secure, so that hackers don't decide to hijack your Web site and distribute malicious software for you.

Learn more about viruses from PCWorld.

Doorway pages or Gateway pages are pages that are optimized for one key term but are really designed to be gateways to lead you to different content. For instance the "blueberry," "strawberry," and "orange" gateways might all be designed to get you to go to "fruit punch."

Doorway pages usually have very little in the way of original content and often cloak or redirect users to the intended Web site. Be aware of affiliate programs, because some of these may look like doorway pages to Google.

Google doesn't appreciate robots writing your content, and they're even less appreciative of robots checking your ranking. Automated Google queries and automated link submission are both against Google's terms of service, and both of them can get your site banned. They tie up computing resources for everyone.

In Conclusion

Don't be a jerk. Optimize your Web site for Google by designing a clear, well organized site. Don't try to trick people or take the lazy way out of making good content.

From Marziah Karch