Google is the king of the search engines. What Google does, all others follow. They employ some of the best minds in the internet and software industry. They are as ethical as can be on the web. Why would you even want to try to fool them in any way? As a general, do your keyword research, have good, fresh content on your site and indexing and site rankings will follow.

Yes, some people think that they have tricked Google. They truly believe that something they did has rocketed their site to the top of Google's listings.

They believe that they have managed to "stick it to the man." Nine times out of ten when this happens they either performed an SEO procedure that Google allows or even endorses or they just happened to fill Google's criteria better than other sites in their keyword niche without even realizing it.

Once in a while someone does actually come up with a way to fool Google. For a few months they seem to ride high, but as soon as Google notices it has been cheated the site is removed from their index. Usually they get banned.

The reality is that Google has incredible power on the web. Anyone with a real interest in making money on the internet should consider that getting banned from the search engines effectively removes your site from the marketing arena. They don't have to let you back in, and they don't have to give you any right to respond. Stay on the SEO "good" side.

Aside from the fact that Google will remove you from its listings, there is another incentive against trying to fool them. Ethically, you are fooling your clients. There is no reason to try to lure visitors onto your page expecting to get something and really giving them something else. This is a poor way to conduct business and more often than not it will

chase the customer away for good.

If you want your website to be found in categories that don't apply to it, try purchasing ads on pages that are listed towards the top of the Google listings in these categories. You can actually increase your sites reputation in Google's eyes rather than hurting it by adding another link to your site. This is an excellent form of marketing because it allows you to reach out beyond your market simply by dishing out a few dollars a month.

Some of the most popular methods of trying to fool Google's PageRank system are link farms and link exchanges. Link farms are basically websites that exist only to get links to specific sites counted by the search engines. Link exchanges are groups of websites that each pay a monthly fee to link to each other - like link farms, only more expensive and dodgy. In both cases, the websites involved are attempting to climb the ranks of Google's search results through the sheer quantity of links to them -this is known as Google bombing. But it doesn't always work.

Why is Google so harsh?

It knows that cheaters can ruin their search engine's reputation, thus marketing revenue. It's all about money and profits and power. If link farms inflate the rankings of less-useful Websites, then we'll all start seeing worse search results. That's why Google constantly updates PageRank to keep those kinds of sites away. The Page Rank formula that Google implements is complicated, not published and ever

changing.

It has been found recently that Goggle is now sending out 'cloak bots', disobeying robots.txt to find out whether sites are 'cloaking' - serving a different page to search engines - than what visitors see. These 'cloak bots' are controversial but seem to have some positive effects on the Google's results.

Unethical methods make it difficult for people who are trying to do SEO the proper way, which is one of the reasons why it needs to be monitored so carefully. If people stopped trying to find ways to manipulate the system, it would be much easier to keep up with what's going on.