Why you should stay away from Dirty SEO

The very thought of asking a webmaster to stay away from SEO is very repelling, right? After all a webmaster always nurtures a dream even right in his sleep to see his site soaring in ranking and links. Okay, so whole idea is not to advice about not optimizing your site but rather not to fall prey to “Optimization Experts”. Not even the so called, ethical or “white hat” optimization.

I firmly believe, good navigation, simple layout, rich content constitute 90% of the site optimization. Rest of the optimization resorted to by optimization experts is “how to manipulate search engine rankings” and in the process and unwritten, unsaid feeling at the back of mind is that even if we succeed at first, search engines would never get to know, or never get to improve or never punish such site.
I must quote a phrase from Aaron Wall's dictionary, that there is no such thing as ethical SEO because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ any technique to manipulate the search engines, you "SPAM." The only question is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective?
Very True. In fact this should answer any question in your mind, if you are long term in web business, would you like to get a reputation of a spammer, EVER.
So any optimization that revolves around the concept of manipulating search engine result, getting fake links to get PR, fake PR, stuffing of keywords and so on would one day lead to getting caught. In fact, while writing, I never check even keyword density, you should create content in a language that comes naturally to you and not guided by as how many times more a keyword should come.
In fact, unfortunately, this knowledge is being used to harm a competitor’s web site. There are many instances where people have used to negative SEO for a competitor’s site. Special scripts are created to generate multiple links of a site using same anchor text and a search engine is shown multiple copies of same page on the net. A search engine is led to believe that the site is a spamming site and his results get classified in supplemental results.
Another technique used is to copy your content and dump the same in MFA sites which are given at a throw away price, but to you, the harm is done when you see dozens of copies of your articles floating around on the net.
Then the competitor doing so, may also proceed to report such site to Google and Google is also known to encourage such complaints.
As is said, what goes around comes around. Instead of becoming wiser on hindsight, it would be a good idea to stay away from such practices.