Which Seo Techniques Should Be Avoided

 Google is what every website owner strives towards. However, Google’s ever-evolving algorithm can make it difficult for those to navigate the world of SEO. As a digital marketing agency, we come across many outdated SEO techniques that are still commonly used today.

Whilst ‘White hat SEO’ is the term used for ‘good’ SEO practices, aimed at real users, ‘Black hat’ or ‘Grey hat SEO’ are practices targeted at search engines to try to trick the algorithm to rank higher. These techniques are either ineffective, come with risk, or both!

So, before detailing the ‘Top 10’ bad SEO practices, we would like to briefly explain ‘Whitehat’ and ‘Blackhat’ SEO.  In a nutshell, there are three types of SEOs. The first type is paid-for:  advertisements on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo pay money for a high position. These are similar in nature to PPC (Pay Per Click). The second type is free SEO:  this is where SEOs try to get their clients’ sites ranked on search engines by using ‘white-hat’ practices, but without having a client pay for it. The third type is Blackhat SEO:  this is the practice where a person will try to trick Google into ranking their site higher. For example, using ‘blackhat’ techniques to implement search engine bots to do the work for them. These techniques are illegal and will result in suspension of your site(s) from Google and/or other search engines.

The good news is, Google is continually working hard on it's algorithm to find and kill popular blackhat tactics.

Whilst we’re on the subject of ‘bad SEO’, here are our top 10:

1. Keyword Stuffing

Google is at its best when analysing data and it cannot ignore keywords. So it seems common sense that adding as many keywords as possible to maximise your website’s page 1 ranking might be a good idea. Unfortunately this is not the case and Google will simply gobble up all these words and ignore any long tail keywords you may think are relevant. The majority of websites use keyword research tools or they manually search for relevant keywords to include in their content. But, stuffing in as many keywords as possible into your website is not a good idea.

2. Penguin Algorithm

Google has given a lot of weight to its Penguin algorithm in recent years, although it’s hard to pinpoint what the algorithm actually does (although there has been speculation that it filters out spam sites and penalties sites for producing spam).