It is a scary thought that this can indeed happen and has happened to some major websites.  It is therefore paramount that you learn from the mistakes of others and make sure you follow each of the search engines guidelines and make sure you only follow legitimate ways of optimising your site.

Lets face it, the ranking of your site is pretty much the most important aspect of your online presence.  We have discussed before that having a pretty site is great, but what is the use if no one ever gets the opportunity to find it?

If you have implemented a successful SEO campaign or are in the middle of doing so, make sure you follow these 3 vital points on what not do to when promoting your site for the search engines.

Never Spam

If you are unaware of the definition of spam please read Wikipedia’s brilliant article on it.  Basically, if your website is found out to be spamming or spammy in nature, Google, Yahoo and Bing are not going to index you for very long.

Implementing spam can negatively affect your sites rankings. It can however, positively affect your sandwich.

The way the search engines define spam changes frequently and it is always a good idea to educate yourself on this subject just to make sure you are following the correct path.

If your site does get caught for spamming then not only will you be de-indexed you may find that your domain gets blacklisted and will therefore be banned forever!

Never Use Frames

Again if you are unaware of what these are please visit this explanation on why you should not use frames.  For search engines to crawl your site they send out spiders.  This is essentially a computer program that trawls all the pages on the web.

Using frames to construct your site will have a bad effect on search engine optimisation

Currently, these spiders cant read websites that use frames so if you are using them then you are at a major disadvantage over your competition.

Don’t Use Invisible Text To Stuff Keywords Into Your Content

If you want to rank high you better be willing to write unique quality content.  Long gone are the days that you could simply submit a list of keywords to your page and sit back and wait for the traffic to come in.  Some webmasters feel the need to do this even today and will try to fool the search engines by using text invisible to the human eye.

If you are caught doing this, its goodbye for your much loved website.

Make sure you keep an eye out for things not to do when optimising a site, if you stay on the path of legitimate SEO you will see that your site will be included in the index of any search engine and as a result of that, will see long term benefits.  Just remember to be sensible with your SEO.