Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a critical element of a website’s overall digital marketing. By engaging in effective SEO tactics such as writing informative content on your website or improving your website’s pagespeed to deliver optimal user-experience, your website will increase its chance of appearing highly on search results. This improvement helps you gain more online visibility to your target audience, increase website traffic, and convert more clients.
While effective SEO is an integral digital marketing approach, some SEO tactics can adversely impact your website’s search ranking. For example, your website may be removed from Google search results or decrease in search ranking due to poor SEO tactics.
Here are five tactics you should avoid implementing!
Spam Comments
Some SEO agencies would write spam comments by writing a comment in a blog and leaving a link to your website in the comment to generate a backlink for your website. This approach is risky because the backlink is unauthentic and could cause Google to penalize your website by dropping your search ranking. You can find out if the Toronto SEO agency that you’re using is utilizing spam comments to gain backlinks by performing a technical Toronto SEO audit.
Buy Backlinks from Private Blog Network
A private blog network or PBN is a group of blogs or websites that link to each other. The blogs or websites may have high domain authority because they receive a multitude of backlinks from one another but the backlinks are oftentimes “poisonous”. Google wants websites to receive backlinks from authentic websites such as online newspapers or business publications. For example, if you’re a Toronto Google Ads agency or Google Analytics consulting agency, you want to gain authentic backlinks from industry publications.
Engage in cloaking
Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.
This is a severe offense to Google because this tactic makes your website untrustworthy to Google and will cause your website to be deindexed and disappear from Google search results!
4. Write Hidden Text
Some SEO specialists would write chunks of text on a website using the background color of the website so readers cannot read it but Googlebot can see the text in HTML format. It is essentially a keyword spamming tactic.
With the advanced progression of Googlebots, artificial intelligence and machine learning, Googlebots are capable of detecting hidden text and discount hidden text. If your website is caught using hidden text, your website will lose its search ranking.
5. Create Doorway Pages
Doorways are sites or pages created to rank highly for specific search queries. These pages are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results because each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.
Examples of doorways:
- Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.
- Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site(s).
- Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browsable hierarchy.
Similar to other condemned SEO tactics, getting caught with using doorway pages will cause your website to decrease in search ranking.
SEO is an integral part of your digital marketing strategy because it helps your website improve its search ranking, gain more online exposure, and generate more prospects to your website. However, using bad SEO tactics will backfire and cause your website to be deindexed, blacklisted, or disappear from Google search results. To assure that your website remains on search results and improve its search ranking, avoid using the above tactics!
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RW Digital is an independent digital marketing agency based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Its mission is to help businesses use web technologies, digital advertising, and data analytics to promote their brands and gain more clients in today’s ever-changing digital space. RW Digital takes pride in consistently delivering exceptional work to their clients.
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