SEO Practices That You Should Avoid Like the Plague

There are some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques that are recommended and some that are going to cause you lots of trouble. There are still lots of techniques that are grey areas, where your website may be penalized a little or rewarded a little. There are plenty of SEO techniques that are pretty bad because the user often gets caught and has a hard time recovering from. The items listed on this article are in that area. They are SEO techniques that are best avoided.

Keyword stuffing

This is an old black-hat SEO, but it still happens because people forget what keyword stuffing is. They think it is the overtly bad way where people list keywords on pages so that they are present for the search engines. But, that is only the blatant version of keyword stuffing. The less blatant but still bad ways include putting keywords into text and spoiling the way the text is read as a result. When a piece of text becomes difficult to read because of awkward wording, then Google will pick up on it. If that piece of text has a suspicious amount of recurring keywords then that is deemed as keyword stuffing too and it should be avoided.

Linking from content/link farms

This is another one of those old black-hat SEO techniques that should be gone already. Again, there are subtle ways of linking from content/link farms and most of them involve using SEO companies. There are some that have found ways of link from various link farms.

The SEO companies vary how much they link from each so that it is not immediately obvious to Google what they are up to. However, over time the websites are exposed and link farms and are removed from the Google search engine results pages. The websites associated with them will suffer penalties too, but because these penalties take weeks and months to occur, the SEO Company is paid and long gone by the time it happens.

Over optimization

This can be done in a lot of ways, which is why it is so easy to be caught by it. For example, you can be penalized for over-optimization if you are running SEO audits and backlink checkers too often. It is hard to judge if you are over optimizing your website unless you have been silly and have stuffed your web pages with keyword lists and such.

The best way of judging is to look at how you conduct your SEO. If you are frequently changing your keywords to keep up with the latest trends, then you may be over optimizing. If you are doing other things such as adding website elements so that you can optimize them with Meta data, then you are probably over optimizing.

Overuse of the disavow tool

The backlink disavow tool is only supposed to be used as a last resort. It is not a tool to be used to casually control your backlink profile like you are some sort of lord of the Internet. Google sees it as more of an emergency tool that should only be used if all other options have been exhausted.

Following the keyword trends too frequently

This is a form of over optimization that is okay if you are doing something such as setting up your backlink profile, but it is not so good if you are changing your web page content so that the keywords match up to the most popular keywords. Not only is this a big and unnecessary drain on your time, but it is also frowned upon by Google. As noted earlier in the article, over optimization is hard to pinpoint, but altering page content to suit the most current popular keywords is a bad thing if done too frequently.

Adding content for the sake of new content

This is an old problem that still exists today. Google claims that it likes new content, but people do not always have new content to add. So, they start to add content for the sake of adding content. This then lowers the usability of the website and quality of the website so Google starts to rank the website lower down the search engine results pages.

Not finishing your on-page SEO

It is mind-numbingly boring having to add your Meta data to the HTML code, and the tags to the content and images, not to mention doing all of your anchor text and such. That is why a lot of people ignore it and leave it unfinished. This is a bad idea, with the only worse idea being when people just copy and paste keywords into strategic locations just for the sake of having their on-page SEO done.