Every day, my inbox is full of e-mail from companies promising that for $35 a month (or some other fee) they can get me Top Ten rankings in Google or Yahoo. Every month, at least two clients ask me whether they should bite. The answer is NO!

These are SEM (Search Engine Marketing) scams. For your $35, they usually promise you "pages optimized for up to 5 keywords of your choice" and submission of your site to 93,000,000 search engines. To acheive this, they use link farms, "cloaking", "doorway" pages and use software that submits your sites to the engines. The most commonly used software to do this is WebPosition Gold. With a few strokes on the keyboard, the doorway pages are ready to upload and your site is submitted to all the search engines, and they charge you the $35 for less than 5 minutes of work.

However, Site Owner BEWARE! These techniques are all "illegal" according to Google, and using these will cause your site to be penalized or even permanently banned from Google.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users.

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here, (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known web sites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.