In the Grey Zone SEO Techniques to Avoid

Search engines draw a hard line at using black hat SEO techniques like hidden text and keyword spamming.  Some SEO techniques are just down right wrong so if you use these black hat methods your blog will eventually be penalized.  In fairness though most bloggers stay away from black hat SEO techniques.  The vast majority of bloggers use white hat, acceptable methods of getting the attention of search engines via use of regular content and pinging.  I've noticed that some blogger though are indulging in a bit of a grey zone for getting search engine traffic.  That means if you use these techniques the search engine may or may not flag your blog.  If they flag it your blog at some point may be penalized.    I don't know about you but that is something I don't want happening.

Here's a few grey zone SEO techniques to avoid:

• buying links - This is a grey area because if you use some blog advertising networks you are essentially buying a link to your blog via your ad.  The technicality is you are buying an ad not a link.  However, there are sites out there that will sell you x number of links for a very low price of say $5.  Do not be tempted to do this!
• link exchanges - This really needs to be clarified.  If a link exchange occurs naturally as in you link to another blog, they notice it and give a link back that is fine and you won't be penalized.  If another blogger contacts you asking for a link exchange meaning you both display reciprocal links that is fine.  What is not fine are link exchanges like the popular Mr. Linky.  Whatever you do do not put your link into any Mr. Linky!  The search engines are penalizing this one. 
• blog rolling - Link exchanges bring into question whether search engines will penalize a blogger using a blog roll (third party widget).  Recently a blog rolling host that hosted a multitude of blog rolls was flagged as having having components of malware.  Anyone displaying that widget had a problem and believe me it did affect traffic.  At the same time anything that flags malware will not gain you any favour with the search engines.  Unless the blog roll is bringing you traffic it might be best to just get rid of it.  If you think about it the blog roll host and those being shown on the blog roll are getting free advertising but without any traffic coming your way, you are getting nothing.  You may even be hurting your blog if search engines view that particular blog roll as a grey zone technique.

A special case:

• automation - Some have suggested that automation of any kind is grey zone SEO.  How so?  Technically automation involves pre-scheduling posts however I doubt any search engine will penalize a blogger for scheduling posts in advance providing they have good content.  Writing a post then scheduling it to run at a later date is no different than writing the post that day.  Providing you use all appropriate, white hat SEO and pay attention to content the search engines have no idea when the post was written only that it was posted on a certain date.  The search engines themselves are bots, reading via text only on your blog with an algorithm to control the indexing.  The search engine algorithms are created by some of the best muli-taskers there are so they understand just because a post comes live on your blog on a given day it easily could have been written days or months ago.  Some say that using automation on Twitter in particular is unethical but since Twitter is meant to be an as it happens type of thing I can see why.  Other tweeple are expecting you to be there to interact to tweets.  Blogging is not meant to be that and it is quite reasonable that a blogger will use some type of scheduling to keep content being posted on their blog on a regular basis.  I see absolutely nothing wrong with using scheduling for blog posts or anything in doing so that could remotely be construed as even being grey hat.

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