SEO Insights: Heres What You Must Avoid to Get on Googles Good Side
SEO news sources, such as Marketing Digest, have seen SEO trends come and go, and make a point of promoting SEO techniques that produce great results and warning against the use of SEO techniques that could get websites penalized. An article that appeared in Quick Sprout (@neilpatel) highlighted five SEO techniques that SEO practitioners and business owners need to stop using immediately.
When it comes to implementing SEO for your website and other web properties, there is a general rule to follow: any practice that is considered unethical, outdated, or beyond the confines of Googles Webmaster Guidelines is considered to be bad SEO, and should be avoided.
Read on to learn more about the SEO techniques that could get your website on Googles bad side:
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing used to work with the search engines back in the day when the bots simply counted how many times a keyword was mentioned on a particular page. Not anymore. The worlds top search engines, including Google, now actively discourage keyword stuffing. As noted by Neil Patel in the Quick Sprout article, keyword density should not be the prime focus of SEO practitioners and writers. Instead, SEO practitioners and writers should focus on creating relevant and informative content for readers. Great content, not keyword density, can improve a sites visibility on the SERPs.
Short and Insubstantial Content
Blogs and news sources that provide SEO insights note that many SEO myths still pervade the online community. Some think that short content invariably performs better than longer content, and vice versa. The truth is, when it comes to creating great content that will rank well on the SERPs, length is not the only consideration. Great content is substantial, and should be crafted to suit the needs and expectations of its target audience.
Moreover, studies show that longer content tends to perform better than shorter content. This is because a higher word count typically results in more search traffic. Evidence suggests that the more content your page has, the better chance it has of a top position in Google results.
Duplicate Content
Lets get this straight: search engines will penalize websites for having duplicate content on different pages. Guaranteed. Furthermore, this rule applies not only to on-site pages, but across the entire Web as well. Creating content thats similar to that found on another website is sure to dip rankings if proof of authorship and authenticity is nowhere to be found.
Link Buying
Theres absolutely no sense in buying as many links as possible if you dont even know where these links came from. In other words, sub-par, irrelevant links will incite harsh penalties, no matter how many there are.
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