The Top Ten SEO Techniques That Will Backfire

Every search engine marketing and SEO company knows that there some shady, unethical, or just plain bad techniques that will eventually come back to haunt you. For instance, keyword stuffing or using text that is the same color as the background are both poor choices if you are conducting a search marketing campaign for a high quality website. However, not every “worst practice” is quite so obvious - so without further, ado, these are the top ten SEO techniques that backfire:

1. Keyword Stuffing - Chances are you’ve seen an article that reads something “use this widget because this widget is the best widget of all widgets…” and so on. Yes, they did get a high keyword density on that particular page, but at the expense of the user experience and their overall credibility.

2. Footers Crammed With Anchor Text - Yes, most people tend to ignore the bottom of the page and even anything located below the fold; however, placing a ton of text and links at the bottom of an otherwise well designed page is the web design equivalent of wearing Crocs with an Armani suit - it ruins the whole effect!

3. Doorway Pages - This sneaky tactic involves redirecting your visitors through doorway pages that are optimized for one key term, but lead visitors to a different (unrelated) site. This is not only frowned upon by the search engines, it is just shady and not the kind of thing that a legit business wants to engage in.

4. Cloaking - Like using doorway redirects, cloaking involves showing the search engines one version of your site and your human visitors something else. The search engines hate to be tricked, of course, and people do as well.

5. Automated or Robot Content - Using a program to pull content from various places around the web in order to fill up your blog or site is potential plagiarism (don’t take credit for someone else’s words!) at best and downright copyright theft at worst. Even if the scraped content is permissible to use, search engines penalize duplicate content and besides, do you really want someone else’s words representing your brand?

6. Hidden Text - Despite the fact that hidden text has been an SEO worst practice practically as long as SEO has existed, people still do it. Don’t even bother to sneak in keyword heavy text that is the same color as your background - it’s a cheap trick that isn’t worth the potential penalties.

7. Reciprocal Links - The “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” system of getting links is another technique that has been used in SEO circles for a while; however, the search engines recognize link swaps and you won’t gain anything from it. On a related note, creating or using link farms to build links is another practice that may get your site penalized - the search engines know where the link farms (or the spam neighborhoods) are located and having your site listed in them will negatively affect your rankings.

8. Buying Links - Like reciprocal links, buying links on high PageRank websites is another tactic that the search engines have figured out and beat. Besides, purchasing a bunch of links with the same or similar anchor text doesn’t exactly appear natural. Contextual links that your site earns because it has good content are the only way to go when it comes to high quality search engine optimization.

9. Social Media Spam - Participating in social media networks and bookmarking sites for the sole purpose of promoting your own business or content almost always fails completely - you might gain a few clean (or dofollow) links, but most social media users are pretty savvy and they can smell the spam.

10. Duplicate Content - Submitting the same articles to multiple sites or using the same content for many websites might seem easier (less writing work, after all); however, search engines can recognize duplicate content and they don’t like it.

It is important to remember that a proper search engine optimization campaign, like most good things, simply cannot be rushed. You can’t expect to be on page#1 overnight - and any SEO firm that tells you that they can get you there is likely using shady techniques like the ones listed, and that will only have a negative effect on your website’s rankings in the long run.

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