Beware! No Cloaking or Doorway Pages

Lets start by saying both of these practices are listed in Google's Webmaster Guidelines as things to avoid. If Google flags your site for using one of these techniques your Web site will be banned from its index...so beware!

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content to the user then what is shown to the search engine. A good example of this would be showing straight html text to the search engine but then presenting a Flash generated page to the user.

Doorway Pages are pages that are specifically designed for the search engines. An example could be a page that contains hundreds of links that are of no use to the visitor. If you have a number of links to share with your visitor be sure to organize them in groups and break them up in a number of pages (ideally less than 100 per page). They also can be spotted as stand alone pages that normally do not fit into the actual navigation of the site. Most often these pages reside on a separate IP as the original site.

One of the most important things to remember in order to stay out of trouble with Google is to create content rich text pages that includes relevant keywords to your subject matter. There is no need to try to sneak something by the search engines they give us plenty of opportunity to get well ranked pages as long as we follow their guidelines.

You can find a complete list of Googles guidelines here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769