[Naikiss]

In my quest to continue on the SEO road to success, i've come across a lot of methods which are recommended to help, such as submitting to directories, producing blogs and articles, but what methods are to be avoided?

What tricks/techniques are a sure fire way of having your URL being banned from major search engines?

I think its valuable to have a few listed to ensure i/we never go down this route and end up back at the bottom of the pile!!!

[Juk]

Since MSN implemented it Honeypot scheme you have to be careful about leaving your domains in heavily spammed guestbooks, blogs...

[Epox]

Avoid having too many reciprocal links.

Avoid linking 'schemes'.

[Angel]

I think this one is so important that it should be on its way to being sticky.

[Juk]

Dont trade links with scraper sites, or sites with no real content. Eventually the search engines will figure out how to penalize them and that could hurt your site.

[Slam]

About too many reciprocal links.

let's say I simply delete my link pages, would that have a negative efffect ?

[Epox]

It's hard to say, and probably unwise to do. The thing about reciprocals is that, when a site's external links are mostly reciprocals - especially off-topic ones - it will likely reduce the number of pages it gets in Google's Web index.

[Slam]

I did it anyway. let's wait and see

[Tangos]

Read this: http://www.webcontent-m1.com/m1/en/support/Library/library1_1/search_engine_rankings