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.<\/p>\n
Practices that are unethical, outdated or are outside the boundaries of Google webmaster guidelines<\/strong><\/a> are considered as BAD, thus the term \u2018bad SEO\u2019. While SEO is about optimizing your website for search engines, bad SEO can generate the opposite results.<\/p>\n So, which are these techniques that can hurt your rankings and most importantly what you should do to avoid them.<\/p>\n Last week I wrote a post about writing SEO friendly content<\/strong><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cno index and no follow\u201d those pages so that they do not have a negative impact on your SEO.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mentioning your keywords in the title, description, opening paragraph and a couple of more times naturally in the text is enough.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You can get post on high quality websites<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>related to your niche not for the purpose of a getting a link but for more exposure and recognition.<\/p>\n Read this article I wrote last year on guest post for links<\/strong><\/a> for a more in-depth analysis on what is a good link from guest posting.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s better not to publish anything at all.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/strong><\/a> and ads.<\/p>\n Yes, that\u2019s bad SEO since Google punishes websites that have many ads above the part of a page that is visible without scrolling (above the fold<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n If you suddenly saw a decrease in traffic then you should check<\/strong><\/a> if you were affected by the page layout algorithm.<\/p>\n Building a successful website or blog<\/strong><\/a> takes time and needs a lot of patience and hard work to create the content and get those valuable natural backlinks<\/strong><\/a>. If instead of doing that you prefer to take shortcuts, you may see temporary success at the beginning and soon enough huge failure.<\/p>\n Buying links for any kind it a bad practice and something that Google will find out (sooner or later) and most probably you will end up losing your rankings and will need to try even harder to achieve something good online.<\/p>\n#1 Duplicate Content<\/h2>\n
#2 Keyword Stuffing<\/h2>\n
#3 Guest posting for links<\/h2>\n
#4 Accepting low quality guest posts<\/h2>\n
#5 Cloaking \/ Invisible Text<\/h2>\n
#6 Too many ads above the fold<\/h2>\n
#7 Paid links (of all kinds)<\/h2>\n
#8 Not using Google Webmaster Tools<\/h2>\n