When it is about growing your online business, Search Engine Optimization a.k.a SEO turns out to be the most vital issue. Thanks to some of these SEO tricks and practices that have helped in triggering your online rankings On this aspect, when on one hand there are certain mistakes that can be overlooked, there are also some mistakes that can seriously hamper your online presence. Some of these mistakes are not just bad but are actually fatal with respect to your website’s survival. Indulging in them can actually lead you to face certain algorithmic or even manual penalties, thereby affecting your site’s organic growth. Thus, to ensure that your site doesn’t have to deal with the same, here are the five bad SEO practices that should be avoided at all costs.
1. Keyword Stuffing – The usage of keywords are definitely important for driving your website’s traffic, but “over-usage” can be equally perilious.In the simplest terms, keyword stuffing refers to the technique of using a set of keywords again and again with the sole target to drive in more traffic in a shorter span of time. Repeating your keywords or by increasing its frequency can definitely attract Google’s attention, but only to drop the growth of your website. What matters after all in SEO is apt content that can perfectly convey the respective idea. Thus, the more you stuff your content with keywords, the more you are heading your site to be plummeted because of Google’s Panda Algorithm.
2. Irrelevant Content – Content is always the king! Apart from the over-usage of keywords, bad or simply irrelevant content can actually penalize your website’s longevity. Not only bad content can damage your site’s credibility in the search engines, but can also have similar damaging effects on your site’s visitors. And when it is about bad content, it includes features like non-descriptive, vague, badly researched and useless content. Google and the other search engines generally target the popular producers of quality and well-researched content. Thus, to lead the game with higher rankings, you definitely need to work hard, producing nothing but crisp and informative content.
3. Broken Links – Broken links basically refer to those links that lands you in an error page. Though broken links often get accumulated naturally, being a marketer, you need to keep a check on these links before the spiders crawl in your site. Once the spiders get these links or simply lands on a 404 page, your site’s value can get diminished drastically. To avoid such circumstances, you must keep a check on the basic reasons like old content, added pages and various other technical issues that cause these links to get built up.
4. Copied or Duplicate Content – Duplication or plagiarism has always been the biggest enemy of SEO. Producing a unique and a plagiarism-free content is definitely a tall order, but copying content from other sources is not just unethical but also downright illegal. When detected with plagiarism, Google can actually crash down your site’s rankings so far that no visitor can even view your site or in some worse cases can even de-index your whole website.
5. Irresponsible Migration – Your site’s migration is definitely important and really quite a lot exciting; but at the same time, it becomes important to pay heed to all the SEO requirements for a successful and a complete migration. Steps like updating your sitemap, putting 301 indirects, updating your meta data along with many other necessary steps must be done to avoid your rankings getting dropped. In case you neglect this entire sensitive yet vital process, you can end up in sabotaging the values that your site’s existing inbound links have. It can also create an interference with respect to your site’s Google indexation and in some severe cases can even decrease the overall authority of your site.
Although some of the mistakes can naturally crop up, most of them tend to be deliberate. Being a site owner, it thus becomes your job to keep a check on them before they drastically hamper your site. At the same time, even if your site is hampered, it should be remembered that recovering from the long term consequences is actually possible. As long as the offended material or content is eliminated and as long as you are adhering to the Google’s principles, restoring your site or protecting it is perfectly possible.