Use genuine SEO methods. Don't even think about trying to play tricks on the search engines to improve your rankings! You run a good chance of having your web sites banned from their search results. Avoid cloaking. Cloaking is an artificial technique that malicious users employ to deliver to search engines content that's not delivered to web site visitors. ("What is cloaking?" in Google Information for Webmasters, Google.com (no date).) Some web sites try to trick search engines by delivering specific content that only the search engines will see. There are many debates around the Web about what the term "cloaking" does or doesn't cover; for instance, some question whether or not using CSS to hide content from web site visitors, or using JavaScript sniffing to serve different content to specific search engines than is served to web site visitors, is cloaking. Avoid using doorway pages or domain names used for doorways. Doorway pages, or domain names used for doorways, are web pages or domain names that are stuffed with key phrases and submitted to search engines. Avoid stuffing keywords into comment tags or <img> element <alt> attributes. Content in comment tags offers no benefit at all, and the image <alt> attribute should only be used as a text alternative for an image. Avoid using JavaScript or <meta-refresh> redirects to try to trick search engines. Often, search engines won't index pages that use JavaScript or <meta-refresh> redirects because, historically, so many web sites used them to trick search engines. So even if you want to use these techniques without trickery in mind, avoid doing so! Otherwise, your web site may be banned from search engines by mistake. Some argue that these techniques fall under the definition of cloaking, but regardless of whether or not you agree with that opinion, it's better to avoid using JavaScript or <meta-refresh> redirects.
Good points! I was wondering, does building back link come under "play tricks"? For example - writing articles, submitting to directories, guest postsing, useful blog commenting for back links. Do you think if Google manualy checked my back links & found these I would get banned?
If done organically, then no. But Google has long gone after sites that buy back-links and other short cuts.
Organically is referred to growth of your website purely by search engines. Search engine traffic is also known as 'organic' traffic.
I guess I could have said that better. Basically if you build your back links by hand (ie manually submitting to directories, posting on forums, commenting on blogs etc) you should be fine. However if you use software to build hundreds of links at the click of a mouse then there's a chance you'll get sandboxed and/or banned. This is especially true for domains under 1 year old. Plus, a lot of those software use the same places over and over to build the backlinks so it doesn't take google that long to identify them as "bad neighborhoods." On another forum I frequent I read about a guy who just got his domain re-indexed after 2 years of being banned by google.