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| 10 SEO Sins That Will End Your Google Career Forever! |
Many of us take our appearance in Google search results for granted. While it requires a lot of effort to rank #1 for popular queries,
it doesn't take rocket science to get your site into Google's index.
Well, getting into the index once isn't difficult, but doing it again is
after your site has been kicked out. Yes, the biggest bully on the
internet could decide to remove your website altogether in a day. But
not without reason. If you know anything about SEO in 2014, you should know better than to make these mistakes.
1. Buying Links
Need we even discuss this one? There are tonnes of so called 'SEO firms'
out there promising to sell quality links. The tragedy isn't in the
existence of such firms - it is in people falling for such scams more
often than not.
Most often, the links these companies 'sell' are from cheap or spammy
sites. Even if they promise high-quality links, changes are good that
these links won't even be relevant. It's like having a doctor write up
our letter of recommendation for your IT job interview - it just doesn't
work, and definitely doesn't help. And that is the best case scenario.
Often, these links are from cheap and spammy websites.
Best stay away from them because Google takes the strictest action against buying links.
2. Bad Link Directories
This is a very common mistake people make - submitting their sites to
whatever link directories they can find. Google's Matt Cutts recently
addressed the question in a video, and we elaborated on that quite a
bit. I'd highly recommend you read the following article.
- Should you use link directories in 2014?
The bottom-line is, most link directories are not relevant, and hence
links from them will only hurt you. Even if they are relevant, the
effect of the link diminishes with as the total number of listed sites
increases, in which case they're still not helpful. Only rarely do link
directories help (read the article for our insight!)
3. Article Marketing
The idea is you could write an article, “spin” multiple versions of it,
making small adjustments to the wording, and then submit those versions
to different websites that collect free articles in exchange for a link
back to your site. Back in the 2000s,
this method worked very well, and sites like Ezine Articles and
Articles Base rose to popularity. But today, the technique is no longer
useful.
Google used to think that the different links from the spun articles
were really unique. But over the years, their algorithm has gotten
better and better at sniffing out articles with small variations.
Articles that used to rank for years are now plummeting, because Google
recognizes them for what they are: spam.
4. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is one of the most common SEO mistakes. One of the most
common SEO mistakes that looks dumb too. I am sure you hate most common
SEO mistakes too.
See what I did there? Not only is the above sentence wordy and
redundant, it also has the key-phrase "most common SEO mistakes" stuffed
three time when once was enough. I wrote like that to make a point.
People put in excess keywords to get attention from search engines. But
as you know, Google now knows better. You’ll attract Google for sure,
swiftly followed by a kick down the results pages.
5. Unnatural Anchor Text
Anchor text is the text that has a hyperlink attached to it. Anchor text
helps Google determine the relevance of a link. For example, the link "Blogger widgets"
should be about widgets for Blogger. But some people try to best the
system by building spam links, and using the terms they want to rank for
as the anchor text, hoping it’ll increase their chances of getting
ranked. For example, using the "Blogger widgets" anchor text for a link
to an ad.
Some people also use the same anchor text over and over again. If I
wanted to link back to this site, I wouldn't use the "Blogger tricks"
keyword every time. Duplicate and irrelevant anchor text will definitely
land you a Google penalty.
6. Broken Links
You have some content, maybe a product review that has won over a
reader, who now wants to become a customer. They are enthusiastic and
click on the link that should take them to the purchase page.
Poof, 404!
Aaaand, you've lost a customer.
Sites naturally accumulate broken links: however they’re a major
nuisance to your visitors and Google doesn’t like them either. But, if
they’re so natural, why does Google penalize you for them? It’s because
bad links will earn you a bad reputation. And people with online
reputations aren't viewed as authorities on anything (apart from getting
bad reputations, that is).
Anyway, Google downgrades rankings of sites with lots of issues like
this, so don’t be a rebel without a cause. Do some regular housekeeping
on your site.
7. Content Cloaking
Cloaking content is a ruthless black hat SEO technique. Cloaking means
hiding some content from the search engine, or displaying a version of
some text to the search engine that is different from the one presented
to the user. This is usually used in over-promotion, phishing, etc.
Hidden text is text that is made invisible to the readers so that they
can't see what they're clicking on. This trick can be achieved by
playing around with colors. For example, white text won't show against a
white background. These techniques are unethical, and cheap. And by
now, you should know better than to use them.
8. Excessive internal-linking
Interlinking content within your site is a great SEO practice. We always
recommend people to interlink more often. But there's a catch. In an
attempt for over-optimization, some webmasters interlink so much that
there are more than a couple links in any given post pointing at the
same page. And to make matters worse, they might even link repeatedly to
their home pages. Well that, my friends, is a recipe for disaster.
9. Duplicate content
It often happens that those who are unable to write good quality content
themselves resort to underhand means of obtaining such content. Since
they don't have much content to write about, they re-use content from
others. While quotes and stuff are okay, copying entire paragraphs off
others' posts and rephrasing them is just plain wrong.
10. Non-unique title and meta descriptions
Sometimes CMSs like Drupal and WordPress auto-generate page titles, but
that doesn’t mean you should let this continue. The title tag is one of
the most important on-page SEO factors, and so is the meta description.
Both these tags describe your content to users on search engines, so
naturally they get more attention from Google than your other content.
Make sure each page on your site has a unique title and meta
description, otherwise you'll have a lot to pay for!
Do you make these 10 SEO mistakes? If not, then let's see if you can
pass the next challenge. Head over to the link below and see where you
belong!
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