Put that black hat away. Shady SEO tactics can get your site severely penalized by search engines. Punishments can range from losing organic traffic for a few days to losing it permanently.

For any business, its website is a business asset with value that accrues over time and should be treated as such. Here are five timeless “worst practices” to avoid:

1) Link buying – Attempting to make your site more authoritative by paying for links (see J.C. Penney). 

A major element of most search engines’ ranking algorithm (especially Google’s) is “link popularity.”  Simply put, link popularity is a measure of the authority, trustworthiness and number of links pointing to a domain. Authoritative and trustworthy websites (Forbes, The New York Times, PBS, etc.) are able to pass along a significant amount of their authority and trust if they link to a company’s website. Not surprisingly, these links tend to be very difficult to get. However, there are also cases where sheer “tonnage” of links suffice to boost rankings and organic search traffic.

Unfortunately, it’s very common for sites to try to cheat the system. Instead of creating a remarkable website, stellar services and content, unethical Web marketers try to buy their way to the top by purchasing links. There is no shortage of site owners who would link to a site for a fee. Buying links should be avoided at all costs. It is a violation of any search engine’s Terms of Service, and it can get a site banned from the index.

J.C. Penney famously got caught in 2011 for buying large amounts of links. The company was banned from Google’s index for 90 days. While losing a full fiscal quarter’s worth of profit

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Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/03/13/top-5-outlawed-seo-tactics/