SEO is all about boosting a website. However, when the practice is unethical or outdated, it can be termed as a “Bad SEO”, which is common among those new to SEO and can affect your site Google rankings and give you negative results. Some techniques need to be avoided since they can destroy your rankings.

Duplicating Content

A good SEO needs unique content because if the search engine has content that was already uploaded elsewhere then that will be the old content posted again. One might be tempted to use the same content in different pages as a time-saving strategy and you might think that this is okay since you are the original content owner and a search engine like Google will not give it a second thought if a similar section appears on numerous occasions, but that is the opposite. If you’re not putting in the effort to make new and remarkable content for each page of your site, the web indexes might start doubting and losing trust in you. This is even worse if you use someone else’s content on your site and search engines might even view this as plagiarism. The best practice is playing by the rules.

Cloaking

This is an outdated practice also known as ‘invisible text’ which refers to intentionally displaying different content versions of a page to crawlers and users. People who use cloaking are trying to hide something from crawlers like ads and crawlers are not used to these. This outdated technique is not recommended and it is advised that you should only use one version for both crawlers and users on your page to help users differentiate website contents and ads.

Buying /Paid links

It requires hard work and patience to build and have a successful website and taking shortcuts might seem like a quicker way to success when in actuality it is not. Links are supposed to connect people to relevant content and choosing the site that the user finds valuable and buying your way up is being dishonest and you will be deceiving both crawlers and site users. This technique is highly discouraged.

Keyword Link Filling

Revealing the keyword at the title, the introduction and a few times in the description is good enough but emphasizing and repeatedly using the same keyword to heighten your content is bad practice. This practice highly discourages users from reading your content and can also send a signal to search engines that someone is trying to influence the outcomes or playing a trick on them.

Guest Posting

While guest posting can be an incredible method to link back to your website, it can harm your rankings whenever done inexpensively and wrongly. Regardless of whether it is backlinks or visitor posts, you need to continually check the sites to which your site is connected or linked. For backlinks, it is incredibly unsafe for one to get traffic referred from sites of questionable quality.  The hyperlink that connects two sites conveys information that should be worthy of attention from users of one site to the next. You should always insist on acquiring quality links through a backlink to a site with consistent and good quality pages.

Additionally, with regards to visitor posting, it is recommended to explore before you decide who you decide to compose and distribute messages on your page to, and to be educated about your own site and its quality. If something doesn’t work as expected or looks dubious or complicated, you should consult an SEO expert such as St. Louis SEO Stars to help you with setting your site up for SEO, with good SEO practices.

For a successful website, it is important to follow good and ethical SEO practices as required by search engines, be relevant, stay up to date with the latest developments, make sure that your website is always available and loads easily in a matter of seconds.