4 SEO Violations That Can Kill Your Rank
SEO violations can damage your website’s organic visibility and make it harder for you to appear in search results. What harmful SEO tactics should you stay away from and what should you do instead? Here are four SEO violations that can kill your website in search and a few basics to keep in mind when determining your SEO tactics.
1. Black Hat SEO
Search quality updates, like Panda and Penguin in Google’s search algorithm, help ensure that searchers receive the most relevant and highest quality results for their queries. These algorithm updates work by penalizing websites that use black hat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, link farming, and low-quality content, in an attempt to game the search results.
2. Low-Quality Content
Having low quality content on your site can damage your SEO because Google and other search engines are looking for pages that present searchers with relevant information. Low quality content on your site can mean thin content, duplicate content from another site or webpage, or content that’s auto- or mass- generated. Because this content isn’t valuable to searchers, this SEO violation won’t help you rank well in SERPs.
3. Cloaking
According to Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land’s news editor, cloaking is the worst thing you do for your SEO. Cloaking means you’re showing search engines a different page or different content than what the human searcher sees. For example, search engines may see a page with text content that matches its URL while searchers see a page of images or videos. So, basically, cloaking is trying to trick Google and other search engines to think that there is content is on the page that really isn’t there – and search engines don’t like that. Don’t try to trick Google.
4. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO tactic that used to improve search results, so some websites still rely on this practice. But, Google’s Penguin update ruled keyword stuffing ineffective, and now it can damage your SEO. Keywords are still an important component of an effective SEO strategy, but they need to be used naturally. Instead, you should identify a main topic or theme for each page of your website and build relevant, readable content around that topic.