Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key factor in boosting a website’s search engine rankings. However, not all SEO practices can achieve the desired results. Over the years, SEO has undergone many changes, and some techniques that used to work before are now considered bad practices that could harm a website’s ranking.
Once an effective strategy to attain top rankings, keyword stuffing is now the biggest threat to any website. Keyword stuffing damages a website’s search engine rankings and makes it vulnerable to penalties from Google. Besides keyword stuffing, several bad SEO practices must be avoided to sustain top rankings.
5 Bad SEO Practices that Kill Your Search Engine Rankings
Duplicate Content
Copied or duplicated content is one of the biggest bad SEO practices that damage a website’s rankings. Google has already indexed and ranked pages with similar content, so it won’t bother indexing a website with the same content. Therefore, it’s essential to provide unique and search engine-friendly content. Thorough research on the topic is necessary to write unique content that can attract readers.
Focusing on Backlink Quantity over Quality
Backlinks are a major pillar of SEO, and they improve a website’s domain authority. However, it’s crucial to differentiate between the quality and quantity of backlinks. Websites with hundreds of backlinks may still struggle to rank in top positions because they don’t have relevant backlinks from authority domains. Therefore, it would be best to have relevant backlinks from authority domains rather than too many to improve the domain authority.
Accepting Low-Quality Guest Posts
Publishing guest posts from other writers is an excellent way to stack up content on your website. However, it’s crucial to ensure that these posts are relevant to your niche and provide value to your readers. Accepting irrelevant guest posts won’t help your website’s performance in Google search results.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword insertion is crucial, but keyword stuffing is not how to improve search engine rankings. Google has become smart enough to understand the context of a content piece and can differentiate between content unnecessarily stuffed with keywords and content that talks about the real issue. Optimizing the overall content using keyword variation and LSI keywords is better.
Having Ads Above the Fold
Google strictly warns against having too many ads above the fold, which is the area of a web page visible without scrolling. Having too many ads above the fold could harm your search engine rankings.
In conclusion
it’s essential to avoid bad SEO practices to ensure your website’s rankings don’t fluctuate. Ethical SEO techniques and keeping up-to-date with the latest ranking algorithms are essential to achieving your desired goals. If you’re new to the world of SEO, consider hiring a team of SEO experts to develop personalized SEO campaigns for your website.
Author’s Bio:
Navneet Singh is an SEO Expert with 9+ Years of industry experience. He is currently working as the CEO of SEO India. Writing is his passion, and he has written quality blogs for many high auditorial blog sites. His content has been featured on sites like MarketingLand, Neil Patel, etc. He has immense knowledge and experience in handling campaigns of Online Reputation Management, Quality Link Building, Facebook Ads, Conversion Rate Optimization, etc
