In honor of Halloween and all that is ghoulish or ghastly, we’ve compiled a list of frightening SEO tactics that will certainly scare the search engine spiders - and more importantly, your users - away from your website.

Terrifying Costumes - Cloaking and/or creating doorway pages means using technology to fool the search engines and serve up a different page to search engine spiders as opposed to human visitors. Disguising your website in this manner is not only a sneaky black hat technique, it will eventually get your website penalized or even banned by the search engines.

Terrible Treats - Every neighborhood has the house that gives out apples, sugar-free gum, or other well-meaning but definitely not delicious Halloween treat. Keyword stuffed websites are the SEO equivalent of the awful Halloween treat - by cramming the copy full of your keywords, you might rank better for a short time, but you are definitely playing a trick on your human visitors who come to your site.

Zombie Blogs - Splogs, or scraper blogs that just pull content from other websites and completely lack an original voice might help your site rank well at first (after all, the search engines love fresh content), but your visitors certainly won’t enjoy them.

Ghostly Text - Using invisible text (text that is in the same color as your background) can come back to haunt you when the search engines pick up on your black hat behavior and penalize your site.

Haunted Link-Houses - Speaking of haunting, submitting your link to spammy directories or engaging in shady reciprocal linking schemes is the SEO version of living in or near a haunted house - why would you want to associate with something that spooky?

Are you or your SEO company employing any of these fearsome techniques? If so, it is time to re-think your online marketing tactics, because Halloween is the only time of the year when it is smart to scare people on purpose.