There are a lot of articles and blogs on the internet about SEO. Some teach you how to do it right, while others teach old-school bad practices. The latter will get your site into trouble.

In this post, we are going to have a serious look at some of the most common SEO pitfalls. Avoid these, and you'll be in Google's good books.

What is Black Hat SEO?

When it comes to catching sites that are trying to beat the system and get rankings by any means necessary, Google is a lot savvier than you may think.

Black-hat tactics are strategies that are not in accordance with the Google Webmaster Guidelines, and if you are caught violating these guidelines, you'll be penalised. The penalties can include lower rankings or even de-indexing the site from Google altogether.

As internet search engines have evolved, they've cracked down on many practices that they deem to be bad SEO. Many of these practices were once thought to be acceptable, but now it seems that they can cost webmasters dearly. Google's Panda and Penguin updates were both aimed to punish those who practice these techniques.

What Bad SEO Tactics Should You Avoid?

Paid Links

Everybody knows that link building is one of the cornerstones of SEO, but brands can do it right or wrong. One of the worst ways to build links is through paid links. You might think that paid backlinks are one of the easiest ways to rank in SERPs. But it's more likely that they'll land you with a penalty and all your hard work will disappear into thin air.

Today, companies still offer to sell links to your site, which go against everything natural in the algorithm. They claim that these links will quickly help your site reach the top spot in Google's search results.

However, Google's algorithm is now consistently looking at all of the do-follow and no-follow links that comprise your website's link profile. As it gets smarter, it will filter out both spammy and low-quality links, hurting your page rankings.

Backlinks are an excellent way to garner organic traffic to your site if you obtain them naturally. Employ hard work to provide detailed and relevant information on your website via your blog and general site content, or build partnerships with other like-minded parties to establish a good SEO strategy. However, don't try to buy your way to the top by purchasing backlinks.

Link and Article Directories/Farms

Link and article directories are not as common as they used to be, but they're still out there. We often see websites come to us that have been penalised for using them.

In the early days of the internet, people found valuable information on article and link directories. They were a good way of finding content that interested them. Article directories were a great way of sharing information with a larger audience. They made it easy to find relevant information on a site that was organised into categories.

But what was once a good thing for Google SEO, eventually became abused by users, and became a place where hundreds of spun articles* could be found. Eventually, the algorithm penalised these websites, which often lead to their disappearance.

*Article spinning is a writing technique used in search engine optimisation, and other applications, which creates what appears to be new content from what already exists.

By producing valuable content and publishing content that your customers want to read and other people want to link to, you'll be able to gain backlinks from other websites organically.

Cloaking or Misdirection

Cloaking is a tactic that has been around since the early days of SEO and it's a difficult one to get away with. If discovered, search engines will take swift action to prevent it from happening again.

Cloaking is a technique for hiding the true content of a website. It's usually done to trick search engines and send people to spoof or spammy websites with sales links.

Here is Google's own explanation of Cloaking:

"Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

Some examples of cloaking include:

• Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images to users

• Inserting text or keywords into a page only when the user agent that's requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor"

Keyword Stuffing

Talking of keywords, another method that is no longer common practice is keyword stuffing.

This old school spammy SEO technique involved writing content full of keywords that would trick search engines into thinking the site was delivering relevant and high-intent content. In reality, the content doesn't provide any relevant information and is usually useless to the reader.

Of course, more is not always better. A strategy for stuffing your content with keywords will usually yield less than the desired result.

Here at CC Digital, use utilised advanced SEO software to detect over-optimised pages on your website where keyword stuffing may have occurred. Even if it's unintentional, it’s still important to detect and fix stuffing issues.

No matter what search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc), the algorithms are now checking for words and phrases related to the search query to prove relevant content.

With Google's constant algorithm updates, it has become more important than ever to optimise your content. While keyword research and targeting is still an important part of the SEO process, it must now be relevant and helpful to the reader.

Missing Sitemap

A site map is a tool that can help search engines navigate your website. It is an organisational list of pages (with links) that are grouped by topic, an organisation chart, or an XML document. Search engines refer to this when they analyse your site for search engine optimisation.

Ensuring that your website is listed in good standing with all search engines is crucial. Sitemaps are designed to allow search engines to more efficiently crawl a website, so it's important that you have one. It's also important that the URL for the sitemap is found in your site's robot.txt file. This is the first file on your website that any spider will read.

Websites built via site builders such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify usually have sitemaps automatically built-in. If you have a WordPress or HTML website, you may need additional tools to create and optimise your sitemap.

Hidden Text

Hidden text was a bad practice before various search engines outlawed it. Websites would use phrases and words written in the same colour as the background to hide text from the user but still allow search engines to find them.

Duplicate and Copied Content

Duplicate content is not just annoying, but it can actually hurt your SEO efforts. When websites contain duplicate content, Google will rate them lower, index them less, and these sites rank lower for relevant terms. Copying or plagiarising content is also bad for business. Sites with duplicate content are penalised by Google, which will rank them lower than other sites.

The search engines are getting smarter. Google, for example, can not only tell when you're duplicating content on your own website, but it can also detect the author of a piece of work to assign relevance.

Rewriting and adding to an interesting article is a great method if you want to provide fresh and valuable insight.

Copying and pasting articles and cut and pasting entire paragraphs is wrong and can be easily detected by search engines.

Duplicating content is never a good SEO tactic, even if that content is on your own website. This is often seen on e-commerce stores where you have the same products split up into different categories. This sort of duplication can be fixed by using tools like canonicalisation. Essentially, canonicalisation tells the search engines which page you deem to be the most important.

Broken Links

Whoops! Broken links on your site are a big no-no. They interrupt the user experience, which is never good. These are no longer live or valid links, usually, because you have either moved the page on your site or the site owner has removed the link for any number of reasons. They're usually dead ends for the user, who will see a 404 page.

While the debate as to how damaging 404 errors are as a factor for Google is ongoing, they certainly present a problem when it comes to the usability of the website and the user experience.

Did you know that there are many free and easy tools out there to help crawl your website for broken links? Once you've found the broken links, fix them or redirect them to a relevant page and improve the user's journey.

If you're a CC Digital SEO client, we'll detect any broken links in your monthly whole-site SEO audit - so no need to worry!

In Conclusion

SEO is an important part of any business. It may even be more important for e-commerce businesses because of the high competition. Luckily, there are many resources available to help you make the right decisions with your SEO strategy to level the playing field with other businesses.

There are many things out there that can mislead you. Remember these pointers to help avoid the dark side! There is no quick fix to gain organic traffic for your business. If it's promising something too good to be true, it probably is.

When it comes to SEO, we have you covered. Call us up for a free discovery call today and find out how our services can benefit your company.