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Some bad SEO practices can harm the Google ranking. As we see there are lots of factor positively effect how your website show in search engine result, but it also includes some other factors which negatively effect for particular pages in SERP. It is the most important for every online marketer to read the Google webmaster guidelines and actually act on their advice. Below are some bad SEO practices that we have to avoid while doing SEO.
Hidden Text
The hidden Text technique is used by changing the color of keywords to the same color as your background. So if you’re doing it on your web site, you can be easily banned by the search engines. It is very difficult to trick Google, surely penalized, if you caught.
Buying in Links
Most people realize buying a link is a good idea, but some don’t prefer. They are low quality links created by a bots which were automatically removed after some period of time. Google specifically against buying links so basically don’t do it. Lots of sites offering cheap links for even few bucks, just say no to it.
Excessive keywords in ‘ALT’ tags
Using excessive keywords for the picture in ALT tags. You must make sure while using keywords in ALT tags, try to use them wisely.
Excessive doorway pages
Doorway pages are pages either on your website or other associated website which you create specifically to attract the attention of Google and other search engines. You will definitely penalize by Google if you create a page for search engines not for the visitors.
Duplicate content
Copying the contents of other websites without their acknowledgement, and making it seem as your own will lead to bad rankings. Additionally, plagiarism is considered as a crime in some countries. If you make a website make sure your every single page has unique content. Don’t create multiple pages, domains or sub domains with duplicate content. This is the mostly used bad SEO practice because many people don’t wants to waste their time in writing unique content where as content spinning is also considered as bad practice.
Broken links
Suppose you probably visit a website, when click on any link which doesn’t work and give 404 errors is called as broken links. Both visitors and Google doesn’t like broken links. Now these days no excuse for broken links, there are lots of online SEO tools which can check broken links of your website. Make sure when you find broken links fixed it immediately.
Keyword stuffing
Sometimes while doing SEO we are using our main keyword in excess. It’s obvious that we want to rank for a particular keyword in SERP but we have to maintain keyword density. It can be tricky but, as a general rule our targeted keywords should come 3% to 5% of all text on a page.
Links from bad websites
Link to and from bad websites like low quality, gambling and adult websites can affect your ranking. If you link to sites that can harm your SEO try to remove the link immediately. So make a list of all the websites that are linking to you and check them regularly. If found any suspicious site remove the link, if not possible use Google disavow tool.
Reciprocal links
If you have a website and try to contact some other website owner to swap their websites link then this activity is called as reciprocal linking. This practice is mainly seen in web directories. In the past it is hardly suggested for SEO, but these days reciprocal links worth zero because one cancels out the other.
Spell errors
Google doesn’t like grammatical errors in the content. Make sure you spell check your website before publishing it, take a time while writing content.
These are just some of the activities we need to avoid. Doing so will not only get you out of trouble and it will also mean higher rankings at the end.
