SEO is the way to go if you want your business to boom on the internet. However, Google dropped JCPenney on its search engine results due to practicing black hat SEO techniques, which wasn’t entirely JCPenney’s fault as it was its SEO firm, SearchDex. To be fair, BMW has been dropped from Google’s search engine results a few years ago too, for doing similar search engine optimization tricks. As with any strategy, there are good methods to practice and there are techniques to avoid when it comes to SEO. Here are a few that you should avoid:
1. Content cloaking – Considered as the no. 1 offending SEO technique by SEOmoz and Google, cloaking is a black hat SEO technique wherein the website is designed so that search engines and human visitors see two different contents. When BMW was dropped out of Google’s search engine results, it was a result of using “doorway pages” – pages filled with texts and selected keywords to attract Google’s indexing system. Users clicked on BMW’s site for the keyword “used cars” as it appeared at the top of Google’s rankings but users landed on a page that barely featured used cars at all. That ultimately caused the ban of BMW on Google’s search engine results.
2. Link scheme participation – Avoid paying link brokers or participating in link schemes just to get many links to your sites all over the internet. Tempting as it is, Google’s page ranking system factors in the number of links pointing to a site, so, this should still be avoided. Additionally, while link scheme participation may work for a while as JCPenney had proven, it violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and the outbound links installed for exchanging links to a spam site in exchange for yours will negatively affect the ratings of your website.
3. Content duplication – Similar content featured on multiple pages, subdomains, or domains without substance or original content can result in higher traffic and rankings – for a while. Affiliate programs with auto-generated content that does not really make sense to humans at all due to overstuffed keywords is also a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines which will get any website kicked out of Google’s indexing system.
Next up: Keyword stuffing, negative reviews, and automatic queries. When practicing SEO techniques, it’s best to stick with white hat strategies. Not only will it earn your website good reputation but white hat SEO strategies are the most ethical ways to do search engine optimization.
