Are You Doing Bad SEO?

Hi there now I know the headline might sound strange but as with all things on the internet its really easy to crack on think you’re doing everything right and then someone suddenly gives you the heads up that some of your activity might actually be harming your online presence.

Confused? Well yes I know its really frustrating but in this post Sam & I want to debunk just a few common mistakes that its really easy to make, so here goes….

Bad (Or Damaging if you like) SEO Techniques

There are certain techniques out there that are considered bad SEO or ‘black hat’ SEO methods.  These are methods for tricking the search engines and they’re black hat because they expressly go against the rules.  Some of these methods are actually illegal.  I want to share these with you just in case you’re doing any of them, and tell you to watch out!

You can actually find forums where people are discussing this stuff.  Some of it borders on hacker talk.  And the funny thing is that they’re all suspicious of each other all the time!  It can be a real hoot.  Anyway, here are some of the black hat techniques that you shouldn’t be using.

Invisible Text

You can put ‘invisible’ text on your website.  This is text that human eyes don’t see but search engine spiders do.  One way is to have text that’s the same colour as the background.  Or there can be text that’s way off to the side and nobody would know it was there if they didn’t hunt for it.  The text could be just a bunch of random keywords.

Users can’t see this text but bots can.  People did this a lot several years ago and, of course, the bots got wise to it.  Now they see it as a warning sign that you’re spamming people.  They’ll find it and ban your site.

Bad Back links

There are lots of back link techniques that people used to use often, and that are now against the rules.  One of them is paid back links.  You would pay people to back link to your site and this would theoretically raise your rank in Google.

Another was the old link swap.  I scratch your back, you scratch mine.  What would often happen is that the link to your site would end up on a page that was just a huge list of links.  Pure garbage by Google’s standards.

The whole problem with this method is that you have links coming in to your site from sites that are not relevant to your site.  This looks suspicious to Google.  They banned the practice and if they catch you doing it, they’ll ban you too.

Keyword Stuffing

I wish that people knew better, but still lots of marketers stuff their content.  If having the right keywords gets you Google love, then having MORE of those keywords gets you MORE love, right?

Wrong!  Keyword stuffing doesn’t make your site look more relevant to Google.  It makes it look spammy.  Anyway, keyword density is just one of the many factors that the search engines look at.  Readability is another.  Use your keywords tastefully so that it reads well and doesn’t look stuffed.

Mirrors And Cloaking

A mirror site or mirror page is one that contains duplicate content but a different URL.  These are designed to game the search engine spiders and it doesn’t work.  Since this is a blatant black hat SEO strategy and spiders are now trained to look for it, don’t do it.

A similar method is cloaking.  This means presenting one site to spiders and another site to users.  There are very clever ways to do this, but unfortunately, spiders are cleverer.  This will get your site banned.

If you’re using any of the above methods, you’re skating on thin ice.  Don’t be too surprised if your site is banned tomorrow.  Instead, offer your users valuable content and do things above the board.  This is what gets you traffic and sales.

cheers

Tony