Spot practices that breach Google's spam policies and explain why they are a poor bet.
Open your inbox and search for "backlinks" or "page one". If you have a website, you will probably find at least one email from a stranger offering to get you ranked. Read that offer against Google's own list of forbidden practices, and you will usually find the offer is on the list.
Priya runs a tuition business for parents and has her own website. Every few weeks she gets an email like this. The sender says her site is not on page one and offers 500 high-authority backlinks this month and guaranteed "top three rankings" (invented figures). The price is low and the tone is friendly. She deletes it.
Google publishes a list called the spam policies for Google web search. Using a practice on that list can get a single page or a whole site demoted or removed from Google results. Knowing the list protects you in two ways. It stops you doing something unwise yourself, and it stops you paying someone else to do it in your name. Most of what unsolicited "get you to page one" SEO emails sell is on the list.
One group of policies covers showing Google something different from what visitors see, or loading a page with words only for the crawler. Keyword stuffing means filling a page with the same words or phrases to manipulate rankings. A classic form is a long list of place names, such as "tuition Tampines, tuition Bedok, tuition Pasir Ris, tuition Simei". Another is a phrase repeated so often that the text reads oddly.
Cloaking shows Google one version of a page and shows people a different version. Hidden text does something similar within a single page. White text on a white background and words pushed off the screen are both examples: Google reads them, but visitors do not. Sneaky redirects send visitors to a different page from the one Google was shown.
Doorway pages are many similar pages built to rank for slightly different searches, all sending people to the same place. A tuition centre that builds fifty near-identical pages, one per estate, each pointing to its enrolment form, is building doorway pages.
Google uses links to find pages, and it also uses them as one signal when ranking. People try to manufacture links for that reason. Google's link spam policy covers buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, excessive link exchanges ("you link to me and I will link to you"), and using automated programs to create links. An offer of 500 backlinks is an offer to break the link spam policy on your behalf. Paid links are allowed if they are labelled so that they do not pass ranking credit. Module 6 shows how to label them and which kinds of link are worth earning.
Scaled content abuse means producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than to help people. Google states that it makes no difference how the pages were produced. Pages written by people, pages generated by AI, and a mix of the two all count if the main purpose is ranking and the pages add little value. Small businesses now break this policy without meaning to more often than any other. One common case is a plugin or AI tool writing a hundred blog posts in an afternoon, each one a thin rewrite of what is already on page one. Another is a page for every Singapore estate, generated from a template where only the place name changes.
Using AI to help you write does not break the policy by itself. The test is whether each page is made for readers and adds something of its own. Lesson 1.3, "Helpful content and E-E-A-T in plain words", explains how to apply that test.
Google lists other practices as well, including site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse. Google adds and updates policies from time to time, so read the current list on Google Search Central.
Google deals with breaches in two ways. Its automated systems detect much spam and can demote pages or whole sites without anyone at Google looking. If this happens to you, the only sign may be a drop in visibility. The second way is a manual action, where a person at Google reviews the site and decides that it breaks a policy.
Google reports a manual action in the Manual actions report in Google Search Console. The report gives the type of issue and sometimes lists example pages. Until the manual action is resolved, the affected pages or the whole site may rank lower or not appear at all. To recover, check the report for the issue type and any example pages, then fix the problem. After that, submit a reconsideration request explaining what you changed.
A trick may seem to work for a while, but any visibility it brings depends on something Google is actively trying to detect. Cleaning up also takes far longer than setting up the trick did. The work depends on what was done:
bought links have to be found and then removed or disowned stuffed pages have to be rewritten doorway pages have to be merged and redirected
There is a more practical reason to avoid these tricks, which is your customers. A parent who lands on a page stuffed with estate names, or on a thin AI article about "top study tips", does not book a trial class. Pages that break the policies are usually bad pages for people as well.
After deleting the email, Priya looked at her own site with fresh eyes. In the footer she found a list of twenty estates "we serve", which a web designer had added years ago. It had done nothing for her business, and it looked like keyword stuffing.
Your site may also have something like this that you never chose. For the activity below, go through your site, or a site you look after, against the spam policy list and note anything that could look like a breach.
Go through your site, or one you look after, against the spam policy list and write down anything that could look like a breach.
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