You’re likely to encounter numerous problems with SEO when designing your web site. Some are easy to overcome. Others can be quite difficult. And still others aren’t problems you have to overcome; rather, you just need to beware of them or risk being ignored by search engine crawlers.
Domain cloaking
Content cloaking, which is accomplished by creating web-site code, can detect and differentiate a crawler from a site user. When the crawler enters the site, it is re-directed to another web site that has been optimized for high search engine results. The problem with trying to gain higher search results this way is that many search engines can now spot it. As soon as they find that a web page uses such a cloaking method, the page is delisted from the search index and not included in the results.
Many less-than-savory SEO administrators will use this tactic on throw-away sites. They know the
site won’t be around for long anyway (usually because of some illegal activity), so they use domain cloaking to garner as much web site traffic as possible before the site is taken down or delisted.
Duplicate content
Many people opt to purchase bits of content, or even scrape content from other web sites to help populate their own. These shortcuts can cause real issues with search engines.
Some search engines now look for four types of duplicate content:
Highly distributed articles. These are the free articles that seem to appear on every single web site about a given topic. This content has usually been provided by a marketing-savvy entrepreneur as a way to gain attention for his or her project or passion.
Product descriptions for e-commerce stores. The product descriptions included on nearly all web pages are not included in search engine results. Product descriptions can be very small and depending on how many products you’re offering, there could be thousands of them.
Duplicate web pages. It does no good whatever for a user to click through a search result only to find that your web pages have been shared with everyone else. These duplicate pages gum up the works and reduce the level at which your pages end up in the search results
Content that has been scraped from numerous other sites. Content scraping is the practice of pulling content from other web sites and repackaging it so that it looks like your own content. Although scraped content may look different from the original, it is still duplicate content,
Hidden pages
One last SEO issue concerns the damage to your SEO strategy that hidden pages can inflict. These are pages in your web site that are visible only to a search crawler. Hidden pages can also lead to issues like hidden keywords and hidden links. Keywords and links help to boost your search rankings, so many people try to capitalize on these requirements by hiding them within the body of a web page, sometimes in a font color that perfectly matches the site background.