We all know that SEO helps in boosting the search engine rankings of a website. However, it is worth noting that not every SEO practice is going to achieve the expected results. In all these years, SEO has covered a long journey and a lot of things have changed.
If you have been closely paying attention to the SEO world, you might know that keyword stuffing, which once used to be an effective weapon to achieve top rankings, has now become the biggest threat to any website. Not only, keyword stuffing damages the search engine rankings but also makes the website vulnerable to getting penalized by Google.
Deals to Grow Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Like keyword stuffing, there are several other bad SEO practices, which you need to avoid in 2019, especially if you want to sustain top rankings for a longer period. If you talk to a team of professional SEO Experts India, they’ll explain how bad SEO practices ruin the performance of a website on SERP.
To make it easier for you, we have scribbled down a list of 5 bad SEO practices which are a threat to the website’s search engine rankings and need to be avoided at any cost.
Duplicate Content
If you are publishing content on your website, it needs to be original. Copied/Duplicate content is one of the biggest and probably most common bad SEO practices which damage the search engine rankings of a website.
Since Google has already indexed and ranked web pages with similar content, why would it bother to index your web page? It is important that you provide something new to the customers through the web page.
This is why it’s always advised to write unique and search engine friendly content. To do so, start with performing thorough research on the topic you’re about to write. In case if someone has already published similar content on their website, you should focus on creating a better content piece.
Take a look at this content optimization guide to understand how to write search-engine friendly content and attain top rankings in SERP.
Focusing on Backlink Quantity over Quality
Backlinks are the major pillar of SEO. They improve the domain authority and help your website to gradually climb to the top of the search engine ladder. Many SEO Experts India uses several SEO practices to build backlinks to a website.
However, it is important to differentiate between the quality and quantity of backlinks. There are websites which have hundreds of backlinks and still struggle to rank in top positions of SERP. There are also websites which have a limited number of backlinks and still manage to acquire the #1 position. Why? Because they have relevant backlinks from authority domains.
Keep in mind that you don’t need too many backlinks to improve domain authority, you need relevant backlinks from authority domains. Although the number of backlinks is still one of the major ranking factors, it is important that you acquire links which are relevant to your website.
Accepting Low-Quality Guest Posts
Publishing guest posts from other writers is a great way to stack up content on your website. People often use this practice to improve their website’s performance in Google search results. While accepting guest posts helps you publish content on a regular basis, it is important that these posts are relevant to your niche and more importantly provide value to your readers.
If you have a website which contains information regarding the latest technical gadgets like smartphones and laptops, then there is no point in accepting guest posts which talk about marketing techniques. Rather than accepting irrelevant guest posts, it is better to write content on your own which is relevant and can appeal to your target audience.
Keyword Stuffing Improves Rankings
Of course, keyword insertion is important. How else would crawler understand what your web page is all about? But, keyword stuffing is not the way to improve the search engine rankings for your website. Even SEO Experts India recommend avoiding keyword stuffing in every web page.
There was a time when SEOs used to achieve dedicated goals by stuffing the web pages with the target keywords. However, those days are long gone. Today Google has become smart enough to understand the context of a content piece. It can easily differentiate between content which is unnecessarily stuffed with keywords and content which actually talks about the real issue.
So, rather than stuffing your web pages with the exact same keyword, try to optimize the overall content using keyword variation. Inserting LSI keywords is a great way to help search engine crawler understand the overall context of a web page. Such type of content is also fun to read as there are no unnecessary placements of the keyword.
Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. If you’re still using it, you’re likely to experience severe fluctuations in your website’s rankings. So, it is better to avoid it and naturally optimize your content.
Having Ads Above the Fold
‘Above the Fold’ is the area of a web page which is visible without scrolling. To make it simple, everything that you see on a web page as soon as you land upon it comes under above the fold. Google has strictly warned in its page layout algorithm that you should not have too many ads above the fold.
In case your search engine rankings have fallen down drastically in the past couple of, do check your website’s above the fold region and make sure it doesn’t have too many ads.
Conclusion
There’s no arguing the fact that SEO is the key to improve the website’s performance and attract desired organic traffic. However, it is important to avoid bad SEO practices so that the website rankings do not experience any fluctuations.
Rely on ethical SEO techniques to achieve your desired goals. Moreover, keep yourself up-to-date with the latest ranking algorithms so that you don’t miss out on any new updates from Google. In case, you’re new to the world of SEO, hire a team of SEO Experts India and let the professionals 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 at SEO India. Writing is his strong passion and he has written quality blogs for many high auditorial blog sites. His content has been featured on sites like MarketingLand, NeilPatel, etc. He has immense knowledge and experience of handling campaigns of Online Reputation Management, Quality Link Building, Facebook Ads, and Conversion Rate Optimization, etc
