Five of the worst SEO techniques
The process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a delicate one, it requires both the website to be well designed and the SEO campaign to be managed with upmost care and attention. The algorithm that search engines such as Google use to index a website’s content factors into account hundreds of different parameters and this further complicates the process.
Aside from the positives that a Search Engine Optimisation campaign can contribute to your website and its online presence, there are also some factors which will negatively affect your website’s performance and ranking. For example:
1. Paid Links
Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.However, some Search Engine Optimisers and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results.
However, not all paid links violate Google's guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. These links that have been purchased must be designated as being a paid link and can be indicated to Google’s indexing service. This can be done in several ways, such as:
- Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Search engines such as Google work hard to ensure the validity of all links on the internet and such search engines provide penalties to websites that people indentify as having purchased paid links. Google and others rely greatly on consumer feedback in the improvement of their algorithmic detection of such links.
When considering using paid links, one must also factor into account that they are paying for these links which are potentially giving their website penalties in Google, this is twice as bad as other poor SEO techniques as you would also be out of pocket while your website suffers.
2. Link exchanging
Link exchanging has been around for a long time, ever since search engines used links to detect the relevance of a web site. Search engines use links to determine the validity of a website for a particular key term, though both examining the anchor text and the landing page. Search engines want links to represent endorsements and valid relevant links, whereas swapped links represent barter, and they are trivial for a search engine such as Google to detect. However, websites that are closely related to your business are useful to have your link present on, and vice versa. This shows search engines that your website is relevant to a particular product or service and in turn your website is likely to be ranked higher.
3. Invisible text
Invisible text is the technique of having text hidden on your website, either by having it the same colour of your background, by covering text with another element on your website or by rendering the text off the readable page. Employing this technique can, and will get your website banned by all major search engines. The process of detecting such techniques are trivial for a search engines indexing service, such as Google’s Googlebot and in no way should this technique ever be considered.
4. Duplicate content
There are a couple of key examples of this taking place:- A number of websites have different ways of navigating to the same content and some websites implement different URLs in each case. These URLs could have been generated like this for many reasons, such as tracking bread crumbs for the visitor and may have been designed this way with no harmful intention in place.
- A number of businesses have separate website sites that consist of identical or similar content. These separate web sites are generally an attempt at trying to implement different marketing techniques and strategies, or for the sale of different products and services.
The main issue with using duplicate content for one’s website is that each single page is indexed individually by a search engine. With each page having a separate URL, they are treated as each being an separate page. Now, with each page, they are given a particular ranking or relevance by the search engine and this is determined by using the inbound links and a variety of other different parameters. With separate URLs for the same content the pages inbound links will be spread across each separate URL and hence diminishing the ranking of that particular content.
5. Flash/All Image Website
Aside from being a very attractive way of building a website, flash and image websites are rather useless when it comes to being indexed properly by search engines. The way that search engines index a website is by examining the text and other readable properties, such as the HTML code of the website. However, with flash, images and movies all the text is contained within that particular object and search engines cannot read this text. Without being able to read that text, the search engine will not be able to rank the website for any relevant terms that are not also rendered as text on the webpage.In short, if you wish for your website to do well, do not consider employing these Search Engine Optimisation techniques. Instead review good techniques or have the SEO team at Titan Interactive use their experience to boost your web sites online performace.