OnlineSpin: You Can't Squeeze Google Juice from a Stone

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fine balance of organizing a site so that it is extremely search engine friendly - generating higher placements and garnering much more traffic - versus tricking the search systems with sleazy methods. Unfortunately, as Tom Hespos notes in his column, many marketers don't know the subtleties of which methods are acceptable and which can prove detrimental. Just ask WhenU, which was given a search engine death sentence last week by Yahoo and Google for these practices.

The main baddies can be summarized into three main categories: putting up fake pages for search engines, creating fake content to borrow relevance against a search terms, and spamming other sites with irrelevant links. Marketers need to be keeping tabs on their SEO firms to ensure that they don't get lazy and start to toy with these methods. The short-term boost in organic search traffic is not worth the potential cost.