When you build a website it takes time for the search engines to properly index your pages and give you any form of ranking on the search engine review pages (SERPS).

Many new website owners are tempted to take short cuts and try and cut corners by using black hat techniques to try and gain an advantage for their site placements on the SERPS. There are many companies that promise lots but in reality delivery very little.

Bad SEO in certain cases can get your website banned altogether and no matter what you do to rectify the problem you will never get listed ever again for your URL. Correct SEO takes time and you are in it for the long run, no quick fixes here!
The most common mistakes for bad SE are:

• Relying solely on keyword metatags:

Search engines rely almost solely on visible text on your website in order to determine its ranking. Text that is not user visible, such as the keyword meta tags, stopped being significant a long time ago, Many webmasters abused it and stuffed too many keywords into the meta keyword area and the search engines got wise and adjusted their algorithms to disregard meta keywords altogether. The practice still goes on but not as common as it once was.

• Stuffing keywords in invisible text

I personally love this one as the practice still goes on. Basically it is text written in the same colour as the background on the user’s visible page. These schemes are easily recognised by the search engines, and are treated as of blatant spamming. A sure way to get a website instantly banned.

• Purchase Links:

Still a very common practice. Purchased links are links to your website that you pay money for. Many websites have recognised the fact that other website owners will pay money for a link back from their website. From the search engine point of view this practice goes against every principle they stand for. They want links to earned on merit and to be relevant to enhance the user experience.

Google for example is making more and more efforts to adjust their algorithms to detect purchased links. They look for obvious patterns, such as the presence of words such as "Advertisers" or "Sponsors" near the link. Another thing they can look for is a grouping of unrelated links that don't fit the topic matter of the page where the links are found.
Google has thousands of human editors in Asia whose sole purpose is to review search results for quality purposes. They are trained in detecting purchased links and will flag them accordingly. Google also accepts reports of purchased links and will send these for review by their team in Asia. Got to love them hey? If you are found out you have a very good chance of being banned.

• Hording Page Rank

You probably won't have heard of this as it is a very little known bad practices compared to some of the others. Basically in order to protect your webpage page rank all outbound links are instructed to have a 'no robots follow' tag attached to them. The idea is that no page rank will be lost by linking to other websites.
Page rank is a minute factor in search engine ranking relevance these days. Establishing, and reinforcing, site relevance is a huge factor in your rankings. You can do this by linking to pages and sites that are relevant to yours.

• Swapping links

Swapping links is a good and bad practice. Now that the search engines have tightened up their algorithms it is easy for them to detect in bound links with no relation to your website content. If you do it you will be marked down by them..
Do swap links with other relevant websites if you share a common interest; Google for example likes this and will rank you higher. If you can get them to link to you and you don't have to link back even better!

• Duplicate content

This old Chesnutt is still very common. The advancement of the search engine algorithms means that they can quickly recognise duplicate content and instantly ban a site. Google likes nice fresh new content; it doesn't like having to try and rank the same content twice.
Many website owners fall into this trap innocently; maybe they have a .co.uk and .com website? From a search engine point of view you are trying to get a double listing with the same content and it is viewed as spam.
Another common mistake is to lift text relevant to your website from other websites. Again Google sees this as a blatant attempt to spam it and will mark you down. You could also be in trouble under copyright rules. Don't do it!

• Flash websites

I love Flash websites; they look great and stand out from the crowd. In reality even though the search engines have made great efforts to index website build in Flash they still haven't cracked it. It is still very difficult for them to index a Flash website and more often or not they will move on and leave your pretty website out in the cold.

To discuss your SEO needs, please contact us by email or telephone: 01525 719929 for a confidential chat.

• Use of too much Javascript:

Again, search engines have real issues trying to read javascript. A dash here and there is sufficient but don’t overboard with it as our friends the search engines will move on!

To discuss your SEO needs, please contact us by email or telephone: 01525 719929 for a confidential chat.

• Website Cloaking:

My absolute personal favourite. Cloaking means showing a search engine one version of your website and the human visitor another version. The search engine version is rich in content, links etc etc,  but the human visitor version is far more sporadic in content.
This is sure fire way of getting instantly banned. It still goes on and is common for some websites trying to get indexed for on valuable keywords where a high ranking position can mean very huge volumes of traffic and lots of revenue. Normally if the search engines don't get you one of your lovely competitors will be telling them just what you are doing. It is a Dog eat Dog world out there!

• Not having a site map:

Search engine robots are pretty simple animals send out by the search engine companies to crawl and index the internet. The Googlebot for example has various different tasks to do when it visits your website. To help it along you need to have a comprehensive site map to show it and make it happy.
The more information you can supply the Googlebot the more it knows about your website. The best way to do this is supply it with an up-to-date site map. From here it can easily crawl your content and ultimately place you higher on the results pages

To discuss your SEO needs, please contact us by email or telephone: 01525 719929 for a confidential chat.