What is bad SEO tricks and why it matters?
Well, a greatly written blog does not mean anything if no one knows of your existence. That’s the reason why bloggers had been trying to figure out ways to get to the top of the search engine results, ever since the early days when search engines were first introduced. Being at the top usually guarantees more traffic to the blog. This is the essence of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Today, there are tons of tips easily available on how to improve your SEO.
However, in this article, rather than tell you what you should be doing, let’s take a candid look at what you should NOT be doing. Yes, there are unethical tricks that some bloggers use to try to increase their sites’ ranking. You should avoid them. Well, at least you should, if you intend to stay around longer on cyberspace! Here are some of them.
Keyword Stuffing
Search engines conduct searches based on keywords requested by users and attempt to match them with appropriate sites. This led to “keywords stuffing” by bloggers.
This technique used to be a very popular technique many years ago. The idea is to get as many keywords, albeit some being unrelated, stuffed into the post. Other ways include camouflaging keywords in the same color as the sites’ background as well as reducing the font size to very small.
This trick will eventually be caught by search engines’ bots and the site removed from the index.
What you should do: Don’t stuff, just sprinkle your keywords and make sure they make sense.
Cloaking
Another sneaky trick some webmasters used was to show separate content to the search engines crawlers and to the site’s visitors. It was meant to increase the site’s ranking through usage of targeted keywords and then misled search users to click on their link.
It would probably work in the beginning but do be warned that search engines are pretty smart these days and will detect it sooner or later and ban the site.
What you should do: Create quality posts with well-researched information. Earn your visitors’ respect and don’t destroy your hard work by being impatient!
Link Buying
Was popular and still is. Many are still buying links from high traffic sites to improve their own sites’ ranking. There’s lots of debate about whether this is right or wrong but let’s leave that to another post.
Instead, let’s look at what search engines would do if they detected this method on your site. They would not take it into consideration when calculating the ranking. It has been reported that they have even banned sites because of this. Though not all are being caught but it pays not to take the risk.
What you should do: Put your money into other more effective Marketing Strategies.
Links Swapping
Right, this last one is not exactly deceiving. When I started Blogging many many years ago, it was THE thing to do. I put your link on your site and you put mine on yours. I did find it somewhat phony especially when I didn’t quite fancy that blog. But it did work in terms of SEO.
Today, this is not so effective anymore in raising your page ranking. Search engines just don’t take much note of it in their search algorithms, and if done too much they will de-index your page!
What you should do: You can still link to other sites. But now, do link to those that are relevant to your topic or business and if you think your readers would benefit from them too eg a reliable source of information. If you could get another credible site to link yours without you needing to link them back, that’ll would be absolutely great!
SEO these days are more about creating a more informative and relevant surfing experience for your readers. So don’t play dirty.
As a powerful Jedi Master once advised “This is a dangerous time for you, when you will be tempted by the Dark Side…” OK, this may be overly dramatic but you get what I mean. Avoid bad SEO practices and say no to black hats techniques. You may find that the journey is slightly longer to get to the top (of search results) BUT you will definitely find yourself staying at the top longer.
This article is written by Alicia A. She is a web designer and developer. Loves WordPress themes and plugins. Blogs at 100WPThemes.com. If you wish to write for HBB, kindly check this.
yes sir,there are lots of people that does this mistake and they think that they are doing right but they destroy the ‘SEO” of there website. 😉
I use keyword Stuffing for my Gallery posts after reading this, i realize how bad its.
Apart from article i like Google Disavow tool.
Thanks for sharing great article Alicia.
Cloaking is a website that brings back altered webpages to search engines creeping site. It is the practice of serving different content to the search engine spiders than what is displayed to human users.
I think one of the important things to remember when optimizing your blog is to not try and ‘trick’ the search engines.
At first i didn’t read “not” in your comment and i was like wtf…
Thank u for sharing this informative post.definitely your post about SEO Mistakes should be valuable one .Because i am a new blogger.i hope from here i got the clear idea about SEO.Sure ii suggest this with my friends. Really helpful and Thanks a lot:)
I have noticed this for a long time now. Many sites actually stuff their content with a lot of keywords in order to attract maximum audience. However, they are under a wrong impression that this helps. It harms the online reputation of the site and leads to negative marketing.
What if I myself have two blogs? Should I interlink them or not?
You can interlink if they are relevant somehow I guess. I’m doing the same for HBB and HostLater.com 🙂
I do the same with Pradeep. If they are related, then you can interlink them.
Yeah keyword stuffing puts the most negative effect in SEO.. Link swapping if done smartly can prove very much beneficial to blog.
Hi Alicia,
Personally – I do agree. Most probably 4 of the biggest No-No’s when it comes to SEO optimization, Both Onpage and Offpage.
I would also like to add overdoing SEO stuff.. Yeah besides doing all the above stuff, one must also follow strict guidelines and don’t over do SEO stuff.. like limitless blog commenting, plenty of guest blogging, unprofessional directory submissions (whether Article or Website)… Google and other search engine hates overdoing SEO for a website or blog.
You said spamy links or Link Buying could effect our search engine ranking but let me know what if someone deliberately try to create lot of spam links to our site ? will this effect us ?
You will be in deep shit if that happened to your site.
Anyway, perhaps the newly launched Google Disavow tool can help you with this.. basically you just need to submit the spammy sites which link to yours to let Google know, and Google will not take the disavow-ed links into account when accessing your site!
Good eh?
I think best seo is write a article for readers not for bot !! So I always keep my article simple and easy !! and try to avoid keyword stuffing !!
That’s great. I think not many bloggers can do that… it’s just a little hard not to write for the search engines, haha!
Keyword stuffing can be the worst SEO marketing strategy that was once thought of being very useful. However, it can ruin the entire ranking of the blog thereby affecting the existence of the blog. I agree that we would surely destroy the blog with these mistakes.
Excellent and informative post! Well yes, linking to the sites which are relevant to niche is really a good and effective strategy and also it would be beneficial for readers, as a relevant source of information. And avoiding bad SEO practices like keyword stuffing, cloaking etc has become important, so as to improve search engine rankings. Thanks Alicia for sharing this info 🙂
As far as I can tell the only thing that DOES have SEO value these days are one-directional do-follow backlinks, ideally with keywords. Plus of course good on page SEO like putting your primary keword in the title. Most of the rest of the stuff no longer works. So get out there and build links!
Links must be natural. Do not build too quickly, or concentrate on certain keywords only. They have to be natural, or look natural. Otherwise you will get penalized too.
Keyword Stuffing and Cloaking is guaranteed death for the page in Google. It can easily detect cloaking no matter what techniques you use. Thanks for the great post
Kenneth, thanks for reassuring that keyword stuffing and cloaking mean death sentence. Google is getting very smart these days, do not test them. 🙂
Keyword Stuffing destroys the SEO of the entire post. Google hates keyword stuffing and it drives the crawlers Panda ans penguins to take on us.
And the link buying is of waste even tough it is of less of cost. The link building companies provides us with low quality links.
Yes, you are right there. Write good quality content and… good quality links will come to you naturally.
very useful post Alicia, agree with you. These type of mistakes are basically used by bloggers who want to get results overnight, but to be appeared in Google’s first page we have to use SEO techniques carefully. Over optimizing SEO on blogs will reduce the ranking instead of Increasing.
You said it right, over optimization kills a blog. I personally advice all bloggers to write for readers but not search engines.
Related: Keyword Stuffing, that’s what I do. Find why?