Duplicate Content Posting
Content scraping provides a quick and affordable way to slap together a website. Although some people blatantly copy entire websites, a more common strategy is to spin articles or post content that link back to the original publication. Despite the widespread practice, “borrowing” someone else’s content violates U.S. copyright laws. Since Google’s 2011 Panda updates, these websites are immediately dropped from high-ranking SERPs.

Keyword Stuffing
Early SEO practices advocated stuffing as many keywords as possible into a website’s content, regardless of relevancy, in order to rise to the top of the rankings. This led to such sneaky tactics as stacking long keyword lists, placing popular search terms in unrelated articles, writing misleading titles and META tag descriptions as well as packing key phrases into repetitive, nonsensical sentences. The shadiest websites even resort to placing white font against a white background hoping to attract search engine attention and accidental clicks from visitors. While keyword stuffing may lure in traffic, this approach does not provide prequalified leads or build a loyal following.

Linking
In an effort to capture the golden egg – backlinks – a slew of shady linking tactics plague the Internet. Dishonorable strategies include paying for links, promoting inbound links from low-quality websites and manipulating anchor text. Search engines also penalize click fraud, page redirects, comment spamming and link farms that only provide useless, endless lists of website addresses. Read more articles on SEO tactics.