Written by: Content Team Categories - 5 Bad SEO Tricks that Will Put Your Website at Risk
Now that we’ve talked about good SEO analysis strategy, let’s get into some bad SEO techniques. Black Hat SEO tricks that you will get you into troubled waters with Google…or maybe even drown you with no hope of resurfacing. Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but we’re not joking when we say you can cause some major damage to website’s rankings if you try and trick Google with unethical SEO techniques.
1) Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Look at the product descriptions below for a glorious example of keyword stuffing.
2) Keywords, Caitlyn Jenner, Keywords
While we’re on the topic, there is another way to abuse keywords that Google will penalize you for: putting keywords in your content that are unrelated to your website or blog. Imagine that you run a blog about souping up your car à la Pimp My Ride. If someone visiting your blog wants tips on installing neon lights in their car’s underbody and sees this: There are many brands of LED lighting that Caitlyn Jenner loves to use on her car. Make your car’s underbody glow like Harry Potter’s wand in battle. Why would someone do this? The aim is to drive more traffic to their website by piggybacking off the popularity of unrelated keywords (Caitlyn Jenner and Harry Potter). But more doesn’t always mean better. You want quality leads coming to your site, not people who are looking for something else and will click away pretty quickly after they realize what they’re looking for isn’t on your page. There are ways to relate your content to popular and newsworthy subjects like celebrities, but only if you do it in a way that makes sense and creates value for visitors.
3) Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?
Highlight the space after the word “is” in the heading just above this sentence… Ah, there she is! The use of hidden text, which is done by making the font colour match a website’s background or shrinking it so that readers can’t see it, is a very old school Black Hat SEO trick that was used a lot in the 2000s. However, there are some people that still engage in it to this day. Googlebots will crawl your website and see this text, its sole purpose to add more keywords to your website, and knock your rankings down. Make sure that all the text on your website is relevant to your visitors and is useful to them in some way.
4) Say what? What did you say? Come again?
Have you ever searched for information on a topic and stumbled upon a few sources that pretty much say the same thing, just in different words? Article or content spinning happens a lot because it is easier to “massage” good content that someone else has already written than to come up with your own. Words, phrases and paragraphs are rewritten so that the text doesn’t count as duplicate content (which search engines penalize). This can be done manually or automatically. But, putting a “spin” on existing content will bring the article down to a lower calibre because it becomes so distorted and awkward it barely makes sense, at least for the automatic process. Take this sentence for example: Dogs make really great companions. Put it into an article spinner and it could very likely churn out: Canines create very amazing friends. Imagine what a full blog post would look like. There is also the option of doing it manually to avoid nonsensical text, but why not better spend your time writing your own interesting articles? Not to mention, Google rewards websites with timely and fresh content. This is not to say that you can’t use content from different sites/blogs or even quote certain parts of the article word-for-word (as long as you cite it properly), just make sure you use multiple sources, put it into your own words and provide your own insights on the topic. For example, the content in this article didn’t just appear out of thin air and everything laid out here is not a new discovery. Many people before have written articles about the same subject a thousand times over, but I have looked at several sites, writing it in my own way (to make it easy to read for people who know nothing about SEO) and relating my own experiences back to the topic.
5) Links-plosion
Have you ever come across some spammy-looking links while browsing a blog’s comment thread? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have read a comment imploring you to discover a new method “of making $3,356 in just two weeks working from home!” A lot of the time the comments are along a similar vein to what I was talking about above:
Tags - SEO Tips, Black hat, Black hat SEO, Search Engine Optimization, seo
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