By now you should be pretty familiar with SEO and what it can do for your company. Unfortunately, there are some techniques which violate search engine guidelines known as black hat techniques – these tactics often fail.
These techniques can negatively impact a website’s ranking and user experience, so read on for more information on which SEO techniques to avoid.
1. Hiding Keywords
You might think it’s important to get keywords on to your pages in any way possible, but the way in which you do this is vital to your SEO ranking. Some people try to get as many keyword phrases as they can onto a website, but filling their copy with keywords as opposed to just headings.
Keyword optimisation is crucial, yet hiding them within content should be avoided as you may be penalised by search engines for harming audience trust in your website. Overloading your copy with keyword phrases will be as obvious to readers as it is to search engine’s – which may turn them away from visiting again!
Search engines are designed to detect hidden keywords and repetitively used ones across a page, making this an unsuitable SEO technique which will damage search rankings.
2. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can also have a negative effect on search engine visibility. Search engines prioritise unique material when ranking websites and may penalise sites displaying duplicated material in multiple places.
Duplicate content occurs when the same content is shared across multiple pages, both onsite and offsite. Each version competes against itself for links and eyeballs – this dilutes the results of the search engine and lowers rankings. Using rel=”noindex” tags can help search engines recognise these pages are duplicates and shouldn’t index or rank them accordingly.
3. Duplicate URLs
Duplicate URLs can lead to confusion for search engines and result in decreased ranking or even a Google penalty. They also waste crawler effectiveness on duplicate content which negatively affects site speed and performance.
URL parameters, tracking codes and more may cause duplicate versions of pages on your website. This can result in duplicated versions being displayed for different visitors depending on which parameter or code has been activated on a page.
There are multiple solutions to address this problem. One is consolidating similar content onto one page and using 301 redirects to redirect all other versions back to it, while canonical tags help consolidate signals and direct link authority towards preferred versions of a page.
4. Spamming
Hackers using black-hat SEO techniques such as spamming are increasingly turning to negative SEO as an untrustworthy method to change the search results for their own gain and damage your credibility. Spamming can have devastating repercussions for both credibility and ranking of any site it targets, ruining their overall potential and harming their chances at survival.
One common method of hacking is keyword injection, where hackers secretly inject keywords into your web pages without you realising. Another tactic, known as cloaking, involves redirecting visitors to an imitation page with spam links which often lead to illegal drugs, gambling sites or adult content sites.
To ward off these attacks, make sure your plugins and login security measures are updated – conducting regular site audits will help identify any suspicious or harmful activities on your site. By taking such measures, you can avoid negative SEO effects and keep your website healthy.
5. Low-Quality Content
Content creation should meet minimum quality and value standards with search engines in mind. Valuable content with skillful writing that draws the visitor in should be the aim! Keep an eye out for any articles containing errors, lacking credibility, or that are not up to date.
Thin content should also be taken into consideration. This type of material exists solely to drive page rankings while not adding any real value for users. Some examples of thin content include auto generated pages, doorway pages, scrapped content or lines of text written haphazardly; by eliminating these types of pages altogether you can significantly enhance website and SEO performance.
Conclusion
Diligence is key on your SEO journey. It can be easy to get carried away but you need to keep on top of the basics whilst your business expands.
Overloading your website with keywords, losing track of your linking strategy, missing technical issues – these will harm your SEO portfolio and pull you down the rankings ladder, so it’s important to regularly check old pages and get third-party audits to fix any technical issues.
