The more you focus on SEO strategy, the more you might begin to think you can outsmart Google. But Dharmesh Shah argues in an article at MarketingProfs.com that gaming the system with sneaky SEO techniques is, in the long run, a losing proposition: "It's safe to assume that if you try to exploit a hole in the algorithm today, your advantage is going to be temporary," he says. "More importantly, you carry a significant risk of having your Web site penalized or banned."

According to Shah, some slight-of-hand tricks you should avoid include:

Link farms. Most SEO professionals agree that the number of inbound links plays a critical role in search rankings. Some less scrupulous practitioners, therefore, create a group of dummy Web sites for the sole purpose of linking to the actual Web site.

Keyword stuffing. Once upon a time, the constant repetition of certain keywords might have manipulated rankings. But no more—search engines got wise to this practice, and it's now a wasted effort.

Hidden text. Placing white text on a white background—visible to spiders, but not to humans—is a seemingly invisible way to load a page with rank-improving content. But, he notes, "Regardless of how sophisticated the approach, it is still going to be detected at some point."

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