As online service providers and search engines continue to advance, so does the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s more important than ever for businesses to follow best practices and avoid mistakes when it comes to improving their websites’ search engine ranking — or they could get penalized. With that in mind, here’s a list of seven bad SEO tactics that won’t live to see 2023.
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Keyword Stuffing: One of the oldest tricks in the book, keyword stuffing involves jamming as many of the same keyword or phrases as possible into a page. This isnt just a poor user experience, but search engines now look for this singe other tactics to determine if content is written naturally.
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Hidden Text and Links: In order to manipulate search engine ranking, some sites used to hide keywords and links with white text or small graphics. Any text or links clearly visible on the page are more likely to be looked upon favorably by search engine algorithms.
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Irrelevant Links: Adding irrelevant links, regardless of how attractive, will not help you improve your SEO ranking. In fact, linking to spammy websites can be detrimental to your reputation in the eyes of the search engines.
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Purchasing Links: No matter how tempting it may be to purchasing links, it’s a bad idea. It does nothing to improve the natural rankings of your site, and makes your website appear to be of low quality.
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Link-Farms: Search engine usually can identify when sites link to link farms, which are websites created explicitly to increase the link count. Instead of gaining the increase in search engine rankings they hope for, it instead is penalized by search engines.
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Duplicate Content: Copying an entire page or sections of text from another website is a big no-no when it comes to SEO. Search engines have become very good at detecting duplicated content across different sites, so make sure everything you create is original and of a high quality.
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Overuse of Ads: Properly placed ads can be beneficial for your SEO, however, if you go overboard, you risk of having your website penalized. Websites with excessive ads are not only a poor user experience, but search engines may assume you’re more concerned with gaining money than providing valuable content.
If your website is to succeed online, it’s important to avoid employing any of these tactics. Not only are these practices bad for SEO, but they could also hurt your website’s reputation, so be sure to stay away from them in the future. By following best practices and avoiding these seven tactics, your SEO should remain healthy and up-to-date.