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10 Bad SEO Practices That Will Destroy Your Google Rankings
ALEX CHRIS29 COMMENTS
Bad SEO is not something new or something uncommon and yes it can really destroy your Google rankings. In this article I will explain what bad SEO is and what I consider to be the top 10 practices that can negatively impact your rankings.
What is bad SEO?
Practices that are unethical, outdated or are outside the boundaries of
Google webmaster guidelines are considered as BAD, thus the term ‘bad SEO’. While SEO is about optimizing your website for search engines, bad SEO can generate the opposite results.
So, which are these techniques that can hurt your rankings and most importantly what you should do to avoid them.
#1 Duplicate Content
Last week I wrote a post about writing
SEO friendly content and the first tip was to make sure that your content is unique and original. In the case of bad SEO, you need to avoid publishing duplicate content on your website.
Non-unique content is not good for SEO. The main reason is that if search engines already have the same content in their index, there is absolutely no reason to index your web page since it has nothing new to offer.
If you need to have some duplicate content on your website because it is useful for your readers or because of the nature of your business, you should “no index and no follow” those pages so that they do not have a negative impact on your SEO.
#2 Keyword Stuffing
Repeating the same keywords over and over again not because they are useful in the text but because you are supposed to optimize your copy, is a very bad SEO practice.
Not only it will discourage your visitors from interacting or reading the content but it is also a signal for search engines that you are trying to manipulate (trick) their algorithms.
Mentioning your keywords in the title, description, opening paragraph and a couple of more times naturally in the text is enough.
#3 Guest posting for links
Last year a lot of people insisted that a secure way to get back links to your website was through guest posting. While guest posting can be a great way to do that, if done cheaply and wrongly, can damage your rankings.
You can get post on
high quality websites related to your niche not for the purpose of a getting a link but for more exposure and recognition.
Read this article I wrote last year on
guest post for links for a more in-depth analysis on what is a good link from guest posting.
#4 Accepting low quality guest posts
You can feature new writers on your website and publish content written by others provided that it is original, relevant and useful for your audience. If the above rules are not met, then it’s better not to publish anything at all.
Publishing new content on a regular basis is a good SEO practice but it is also important to keep a balance between content produced from the website and content offered to the website in exchange for a link in the author bio.
#5 Cloaking / Invisible Text
Cloaking (hiding the real destination of a link) and showing different versions of a page to crawlers and users was a common practice in the past but not anymore. Using such techniques now is actually a very bad practice.
You should only keep one version of a page for both search engine crawlers and users and ensure that users can differentiate between
website content and ads.