Bad SEO is not something new or uncommon, and yes, it can really destroy your Google rankings. In this article, I will explain bad SEO and the top 10 practices that can negatively impact your rankings.
What is Bad SEO?
Practices that are unethical, outdated, or outside the boundaries of Google webmaster guidelines are considered BAD, thus the term ‘bad SEO’. While SEO is about optimizing your website for search engines, bad SEO can generate the opposite results.
So, what techniques can hurt your rankings, and most importantly, what should you do to avoid them?
10 Bad SEO Practices To Avoid
- Duplicate Content
- Keyword Stuffing
- Guest Posting For Links
- Accepting Low-Quality Guest Posts
- Cloaking/Invisible Text
- Too Many Ads Above The Fold
- Paid Links
- Not using Google Search Console
- Having a Lot of Outgoing Links
- Slow or Unavailable Websites
1. Duplicate Content
Last week, I wrote a post about writing SEO-friendly content, and the first tip was to ensure 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 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 hurt your SEO.
2. Keyword Stuffing
Repeating the same keywords over and over again, not because they are helpful 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 few more times naturally in the text is enough.
3. Guest Posting For Links
Many insist that guest posting is a secure way to get your website backlinks. While guest posting can be a great way to do that, it can damage your rankings if done cheaply and wrongly.
You can guest post on high-quality websites related to your niche, not to get a link but for more exposure and recognition.
4. Accepting Low-Quality Guest Posts
You can feature new writers on your website and publish content written by others, provided it is original, relevant, and useful for your audience. If the above rules are not met, then it’s better not to publish anything.
Publishing new content regularly is a good SEO practice, but it is also important to balance 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 page versions 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.
6. Too Many Ads Above The Fold
Yes, that’s bad SEO since Google punishes websites with many ads above the part of a page that is visible without scrolling (above the fold).
If you suddenly see a decrease in traffic, then you should check if you were affected by the page layout algorithm.
7. Paid Links
Building a successful website or blog requires time patience, and hard work to create the content and get those valuable natural backlinks. If you prefer to take shortcuts instead of doing that, you may see temporary success at the beginning and, soon enough, huge failure.
Buying links of any kind is 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.
8. Not using Google Search Console
Google developed the webmaster tools to establish better communication with webmasters. You can get a ton of information about your website and a lot of tools to help you understand how to improve your SEO and rankings in Google.
You can check for bad links, crawl errors, duplicate titles and descriptions, and more.
9. Having a Lot of Outgoing Links
It’s not only the incoming links that can damage your website but also the outgoing links. Websites with many outgoing links without using the ‘nofollow’ tag can be considered link farms or paid directories.
In general, you should ‘nofollow’ any links in ads, comments, and websites you don’t fully trust.
10. Slow or Unavailable Websites
Your website should load in less than 3-4 seconds and should be available 24/7 all the time. I consider anything that does not comply with the above rules to be bad SEO practice.
A good hosting provider is very important for having 24/7 availability, and modern software (like WordPress) can help you build fast websites that load within the accepted range.
Conclusion
What is more important for website success these days is to follow good ethical SEO practices based on Google standards and be up to date with the latest developments in ranking algorithms.
Practices of the past, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, massive link building, and banner stuffing, are things of the past and should be avoided.
