Things that hurt your ranking

There are plenty of things that can help your site to rank higher in search engines, but there are also plenty of things that will hurt your ranking or even prevent it from showing up at all!

There are some common tricks that are supposed to make your site rank higher, when actually they will hurt your ranking or get your site banned from the search engine. First there is the "invisible text" technique. It's pretty simple: Add some text that is in the same color as the page background to your page. Include keywords to this text - the search engine sees it because search engines don't "see" colors, but your visitors will never know it's there. Your site will rank higher because you have more keywords in your page. Right? Wrong! Nearly all the search engines can tell if you're using this technique and will remove your page from their index or lower your ranking as a punishment. Never use this technique.

A similar trick is to add extremely small text to your page (sometimes the small text and invisible text techniques are used together). Try to avoid doing this. While some sites need to have small text because of their design, some search engines may consider large amounts of small text containing keywords as spamming and hurt your ranking/drop you from their index.

Whatever you do, don't start including keywords that aren't related to your site in your META keywords tag or intentionally repeating them in your body text. For example, if you have a site that's about hamsters, adding "porn" or "MP3" to your keywords and in your body text might get you a few extra visitors (provided that your description tag doesn't reveal that your site is actually something they aren't looking for), but guess what? The visitors you'll get by using this trick will not be interested in your site, because they were looking for something else. They'll just leave immediately - and that kind of visitors are worth zero, nothing, nada. You'll just be making people angry, so only use keywords that are actually related to your site.

META refresh tags that are used to automatically redirect a user from one website to another can be considered as spam by some search engines. This is because META refresh tags are commonly used with doorway pages, and some search engines dislike them. Instead of META refresh tags, just link the page to your main site and tell the user to click on the link.

Finally, be careful in how many times you use the same keywords in your text or META tags. If you use one word too often, the search engine will consider it as spamming and remove your page from the index. So don't repeat the word "hamburger" in your META keywords tag too many times even if you have a site that has hamburger recipes.