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Is it worth a short boost to your websites search position if it risks getting your site banned for life in Google? SEO companies often cause more damage than good with their unethical practices. The most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter are shown below.

Shadow Domains
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf.

Doorway Pages
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords.

Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

Hidden Text
Hiding text from the visitor is done in many different ways. Text colored to blend with the background, placing text "behind", text positioned far from the page center, using "Noscript" tags to hide content are all common techniques. As of 2005, many of these invisible text techniques can be detected by major search engines.

Also it is not a good practice to do the keywords spamming in the contents. For example if your site page has 500 words and 250 words are keywords, then search engines will flag this and that site may be banned too. This is the wrong way to attain good rankings.

Cloaking
Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimisation technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the users' browser. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.

Link Farms
On the World Wide Web, a link farm is any group of web sites that all hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine.

Another thing to consider is that, as these companies generally do not have any design sensibilities, they do not care about how stuffing websites full of keywords and links make the client's site look to your potential customer.

SEO often requires making changes to the code of the site. Do you really want someone who is not familiar with this, or worse, not even a qualified or experienced programmer making these changes?

Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.