Free traffic and higher conversion ratethese are two essential things that businesses aim for when planning and implementing their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. The field of SEO has become more competitive than ever because of the millions of websites on the Internet that try to win the attention of a specific market. This fierce competition has caused some companies to resort to questionable and unethical techniques just to get the elusive first-page spot in search engines.

Manipulating search engines to get high rankings is the essence of an unethical practice called black-hat search engine optimization. If you want to make your SEO marketing campaign successful, you must avoid using illegal techniques. Otherwise, you might get into trouble since search engines are smarter than you might expect. Search engines have algorithms that detect manipulative SEO strategies, and they blacklist websites that do not comply with ethical standards.

The importance of practicing ethical search engine optimization cannot be stressed enough. Here are the unethical SEO techniques you should avoid so that your website will earn better search engine rankings.

Duplicate Content/Mirror Sites - Mirror sites refer to a number of sites that have the same content but different domain names. What makes these sites highly suspicious is that they link to one another to get higher search engine ranking. Duplicate content is not relevant for Internet users, which is why search engines do not allow this technique.
Keyword Stuffing - Sure, keywords are among the most important elements of search engine optimization. But that does not mean having more keywords translates to better online presence. In fact, the contrary happens in search engines, which penalize sites that are stuffed with keywords in their content and meta tags.
Link Farms - As you may have guessed, link farms are web pages that contain hundreds of links to sites that are totally irrelevant to the sites content. Some companies use link farms to trick search engines into thinking that they have gained link popularity. Link farms do not benefit Internet users in any way, so search engines deem them illegal.
Cloaking - It involves configuring severs so that search engines will see optimized and content-rich web pages, while human visitors will be redirected to another set of web pages. This search engine optimization deception is considered spamming, so never use this technique at all cost.
Hidden text and link - It is another way of spamming search engines. This technique involves concealing links or text so that they will be visible to search engine spiders but not to human visitors.