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While catering to your site to search engines is important to a degree, it’s important never to sacrifice the user’s experience just to increase your search engine ranking. Some companies, such as Ecommerce Web Design New York, understand this. Fortunately, the search engines also realize this, and take precautions to prevent this sort of behavior. There are a number of shady techniques that can be used to divert traffic, but engaging in them will often result in having your site removed from the rankings altogether.

One such negative technique is known as “cloaking.” Cloaking is when your site displays one set of information to the user, but another to the search engines. Usually, people attempt to hijack popular keywords to redirect people to their site. This results in users mistakenly being directed to a site that they weren’t searching for. One way that cloaking is performed is by putting invisible text or links on a site – the search engines can read these, but users don’t see them.

Another bad practice is to create multiple sites using duplicate content. This can create a situation where a user searches for something, only to find multiple results with the exact same information. This is problematic when none of those several, copied sites provides the information that they need.

The golden rule to consider when instituting any new tactic on a site is to ask yourself, “Will this help the user?” If the answer is no, and you’re just doing it to reap more search engine traffic, you should rethink the idea.