Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Bad Practices...Be Aware
Bad SEO can be devastating for your website! Here is what you need to know!
There are some very basic things that everyone should do to their sites to optimise them to at least a bare minimum level. That would include such things as making sure you have meta tags for descriptions and keywords, different title tags for each page of your site, and alt tags for all images on your site.
A sitemap will help spiders effectively crawl your site and better ensure that all pages are indexed properly, and a robots.txt file will help keep spiders out of places that you don’t want them going. Various redirects, such as 301 and 302 redirects, will help people and bots find moved or renamed pages on your site. These are some of the staples of optimizing it, and all of them are pretty safe and harmless.
As you begin to move onto more advanced SEO techniques, to try and get your site ranked as high as possible, you will start to read about some techniques that sound like a good idea, but are actually just silly and carry some very serious consequences. Some of these techniques may be tempting to try, but are they worth it? What is the risk involved, and how easily will they get you banned from important search engines like Google? What SEO techniques should you avoid?
Here are some of the main techniques which are considered as black hat SEO techniques...if you don’t want to get your site banned from search engines like Google then donut do any of the following...
Hidden Text
Hidden Text is another big no-no.
You as a human might not be able to see the white text on a white background, but Google sees all….and you will get penalised for it! Google doesn't see the “front” of the website, they rely on the back end of it, what is known as the “source code” (which is why it’s important to not just have a pretty website but a well designed website). Text that is the same color as the background sets off alarm bells. It’s not a clever way to stuff your site with extra keywords.
Buying Links
This is a well debated & hot topic. Is it right or wrong to boost your rankings by purchasing links on high authority, high traffic, and high Page Rank sites? Google believes that it’s wrong, and an unofficial Google spokesman Matt Cutts has written about it here.
Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, if it is something you choose to do, then be clever about it – do some research first into the smartest way to go about it first. Don’t cry ignorance later because I promise you, Google won’t listen.
Keyword Stuffing
Closely related to hidden text is keyword stuffing. Keyword Stuffing attempts to increase the appearance of keywords by inserting it in any place that it can go.
On-page SEO is very important. However, stuffing your site with an excessive number of keywords isn’t good, and a careful balance should be maintained. Sure, you want to rank for a specific keyword and the more times you use it on the page, the more likely it is that you’ll rank for it. Just don’t go overboard. Try to keep your writing natural and use the keywords with your human readers in mind first an foremost. Using them too many times will make your site look spammy, which doesn’t sit well with either your human visitors or the Search Engines who rank your site. If it doesn’t get you banned, it will hurt your Trust Rank, which is like your credibility and reputation with the Search Engines.
Always use keywords with this in mind: websites should be created for human visitors first and search engines second.
Duplicate Content
There are a number of ways that duplicate content can be used in an unethical manner. After set up a site you can purchase a 2nd or 3rd domain name and then put a copy of the same site up on that domain address. Sometimes this is done with completely different addresses and sometimes with different suffixes of the same domain - so you may have www.badseo.com, www.badseo.com.au, www.badseo.net etc. The idea is to have multiple sites all ranking in the top ten thus squeezing out anyone else.
Search Engines have become wise to this and if they find duplicate content then they will remove the duplicates from their search results and may even remove them all if they see fit. If you have multiple sites with the same content get rid of the duplicates because they are a waste of time & energy
If you want to use those domain names then put a redirect on them or put different content on them.
There is another way people use duplicate content which is not only bad in the eyes of search engines, but also bad in the eyes of copyright laws…stealing another website’s content. People have been known to copy the content of a higher ranking website and paste it into their own in the hopes of producing the same ranking for their own website.
This is a clear breach of copyright and if you find that someone has stolen your text or images then you should make them remove it and if they refuse then threaten them with prosecution.
“Doorway Pages”
On a similar note to Duplicate Content is “Doorway Pages”.
Doorway Pages are designed specifically to draw search engine traffic to your site and are a bad idea.
This technique relies on the fact that search engines have not been good at reading or following javascript. The idea is that you create a number of single page sites which are crammed & overflowing with keyword rich text designed specifically for search engines. These pages have javascript redirects in them that take users instantly to another site before the user is even aware of the text. Similar to duplicate websites - the idea is to saturate the search listings with sites that all go to the same place, thus pushing out the opposition.
These “Doorway Pages” have no other purpose than attracting Search Engines. No page should ever be designed purely for a search engine!
Search Engines have now developed ways of finding the redirects used in ‘doorway pages’ so technique will usually be found and penalised. If your SEO company suggests doorway pages run away as quickly as possible!
Cloaking
Cloaking is the practice of showing different content to the spiders that crawl your site than you show to your human visitors.
For Example, if your website is a “Flash Site” these are very tricky to optimise as all of the text is imbedded in the flash file… (kind of like text written in an image) so some web designers try to display a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
Search engines don’t like it and view it as deceptive, and no matter whether your intentions were pure, they won’t care you will be penalised. You may even get banned and de-indexed. Personally I don't think this is totally fair, but I'm not Google, and this is one of the main reasons why I do not make flash websites.
Link Exchanges
This was a popular technique in the early days of the web, but it’s not really effective today. Link building should appear as natural as possible. Two-way link exchanges look manufactured, although they won’t get you banned, it won’t help you any either. If you’re going to trade links, at least try to make sure it’s a three-way trade. Never link to the same site that just linked to you. It can be very hard explaining this to clients as they often think about site exposure rather than search engine position. I inform my clients of this "cost" to link exchanges however leave it up to them to make an informed decision about the benefit of exposure from that one website vs the harm of decreased search engine rankings when using this method.
Link Farms
Link farms are sites whose only purpose is to artificially increase link popularity through link exchanges. They’re considered “bad neighborhoods” and Google knows exactly who and where they are and are continually adding new ones to their list. You will likely be penalised, and your site can get banned for participating in these schemes, or at the very least they will reduce your page rank. Avoid the problem, and don’t participate in these schemes, do not deal with a SEO company who endorses these schemes or anything similar – if it smells the same then it most likely is the same. An endorsement from a bad site is much more harmful than no endorsement at all.
Here are some examples of real life case studies of those who have walked down the bad side of SEO and paid the price…
The V7N SEO Blog:
Best known for its large webmaster forum, V7n also has a popular SEO blog which was hacked several months ago. Long after the problem was believed to have been resolved, Google banned them for some shady SEO.
Spammy text phrases were hidden all over in the V7n SEO blog, which triggered Google’s spam detectors and got them banned.
This is an example of how a website’s poor security can lead to exploitation by a third-party, and consequently get you kicked off Google.
BMW Germany:
Even the BMW aren’t immune to the effects of bad SEO.
In 2006 kicked the German BMW site (bmw.de) out of their index after they were caught using doorway pages! This incident made international headlines, and BMW removed the offending pages almost immediately, which were apparently live for almost 2 years before being caught.
bmw.de were served with the “Google Death Penalty”. Their Page Rank was degraded to the lowest possible value… zero, and they no longer ranked at the top of any search result pages.