Very often we unintentionally go Black Hat with SEO, which later may cause a Google penalty making us wonder what exactly went wrong.
Here are few very basic mistakes committed by webmasters which go on to harm their sites big time.
1. Keyword Stuffing – So you have made a nice list of keywords to target for your site, and they’re used all over the content, meta tags and page titles and literally everywhere. DON'T do that. This is hardcore Black Hat that has once fooled search engines a lot, but no more, they are way smarter now. This can get you banned permanently. So be careful and creative with your keywords. It’s good to optimize your content, tags and all but don’t over do it. Always evaluate your copy first and see whether you’re being informative. Check your high ranking competitors, see how their content is structured and try to go one step above what they’re doing. Both your visitors and Google will love you for that.
2. Stupid Redirects: If you’d like your visitors to be redirected to your new domain, do it properly with a 301 redirect or by modifying your .htaccess file. DON'T do this with a Javascript or some other type of script. It might look cool to you but to Google, its not.
3. Improper Text: If your site has texts that blend in to the background or is too small to read, rectify them! NEVER use invisible keyword stuffed text. Make sure the formatting of the text is clean and simple.
4. Buying Text links: Buying your so called "Friends" or "Partners" is never a good strategy, though we all have probably done it at some point of time. Search engines have strict norms against this. Quite obviously its hard to catch you in such situations, still its better to be on the safe side. Again, if you really need to buy some, get them only from sites related to your niche.
5. Link Building: Now this part is tricky. All I can say is, be consistent with your pace of link building. Building thousands of links within a week and then sitting idle for the next 3 months may get you screwed by Google, so DON'T do that. If you are building around 50 links per day, go at that pace or keep increasing it slowly, but no sudden jumps or falls. Same as 4th point, better build backlinks on sites related to your niche(of course not possible in case of Web2.0 sites).
From what I have seen and read over the days, I understand that On site Black Hat SEO can be extremely dangerous. Off site Black Hat SEO can still be harmful, but the risk is not as high as in On Site SEO, because of the simple logic that you decide what you put on your site but you have little/no control over what happens on other sites. So take care of the first three points first.
I'm not some SEO guru or even close to that, so if there's something wrong, please let me know. All comments are welcome.
I hope you enjoyed reading it. I will update this if needed.
Good luck!
Here are few very basic mistakes committed by webmasters which go on to harm their sites big time.
1. Keyword Stuffing – So you have made a nice list of keywords to target for your site, and they’re used all over the content, meta tags and page titles and literally everywhere. DON'T do that. This is hardcore Black Hat that has once fooled search engines a lot, but no more, they are way smarter now. This can get you banned permanently. So be careful and creative with your keywords. It’s good to optimize your content, tags and all but don’t over do it. Always evaluate your copy first and see whether you’re being informative. Check your high ranking competitors, see how their content is structured and try to go one step above what they’re doing. Both your visitors and Google will love you for that.
2. Stupid Redirects: If you’d like your visitors to be redirected to your new domain, do it properly with a 301 redirect or by modifying your .htaccess file. DON'T do this with a Javascript or some other type of script. It might look cool to you but to Google, its not.
3. Improper Text: If your site has texts that blend in to the background or is too small to read, rectify them! NEVER use invisible keyword stuffed text. Make sure the formatting of the text is clean and simple.
4. Buying Text links: Buying your so called "Friends" or "Partners" is never a good strategy, though we all have probably done it at some point of time. Search engines have strict norms against this. Quite obviously its hard to catch you in such situations, still its better to be on the safe side. Again, if you really need to buy some, get them only from sites related to your niche.
5. Link Building: Now this part is tricky. All I can say is, be consistent with your pace of link building. Building thousands of links within a week and then sitting idle for the next 3 months may get you screwed by Google, so DON'T do that. If you are building around 50 links per day, go at that pace or keep increasing it slowly, but no sudden jumps or falls. Same as 4th point, better build backlinks on sites related to your niche(of course not possible in case of Web2.0 sites).
From what I have seen and read over the days, I understand that On site Black Hat SEO can be extremely dangerous. Off site Black Hat SEO can still be harmful, but the risk is not as high as in On Site SEO, because of the simple logic that you decide what you put on your site but you have little/no control over what happens on other sites. So take care of the first three points first.
I'm not some SEO guru or even close to that, so if there's something wrong, please let me know. All comments are welcome.
I hope you enjoyed reading it. I will update this if needed.
Good luck!
