Usually the most common thing I’ll tell people starting out at SEO is to avoid spamming the search engines with repetitive links and duplicate content. This is the golden rule when it comes to White Hat SEO.

Producing duplicate content can push your website to the bottom of Google’s index, so much so that no matter what you do to correct mistakes, it can be trapped at the bottom for months at a time.

I’ve seen many sites that spam Google who outrank well built ones. Google made changes to it’s search algorithm in early 2011 to combat this fault. Known as the Panda update, which was named after a lead engineer on the project, it was created in order to clean up search results by filtering out sites that would either aggregate stolen data as their own or sites that released duplicate content.

SEO Traps

Practicing ethical SEO isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially when you’re a novice beginning an SEO. Its easy to fall into the trap of creating shadowy link farms and have them due your bidding. These are temporary bandades. Optimizing a website should just be that, at least at the beginning. Here is a list of SEO steps that will guide you and can serve as a base foundation when ethically optimizing a website:

Ethical SEO Basic Steps