A guide to avoiding black hat on-page SEO tactics – we guarantee you, they won’t work in 2011.
Google has clamped down more than ever on low-grade websites and poor quality content farms, so if you’re guilty of a little on-page spamming, we advise that you rethink your SEO strategy without delay. With the latest Panda Update, it is more apparent than ever that black hat tactics will not work this year, and Google is getting better and better at pulling weeds out of their SERPs.
In 2011, encouraging organic growth is the way to success, and if you don’t want to get caught out in the digital weeding process, it’s critical to create user friendly websites, not just search friendly websites. Knowing where to draw the line can be difficult, especially with so much temptation to flirt with the grey hats – here we’ve listed a few dark tactics to avoid.
Black hat SEO tactics to avoid:
We’ve seen many new clients using some or all of the following methods (listed below) and for ages, their websites struggled to rank. After coming on board with us, we saw a significant boost in rankings. Here are the things to avoid if you want the same success this year:
1. Keyword stuffing – while Google used to fall head over heels for a keyword dense article, it has now developed a way to differentiate between SEO cheats and genuine contenders. Stuffing your articles with unnatural keywords and working to an unnatural keyword density will not work in your favour.
2. Duplicate content – sites which were most affected by the recent Panda Update were content duplication offenders. Google’s new algorithm is hot on hitting these low-grade websites, and this applies to duplicate content internally and externally.
3. SEO driven content – having content on your website is important, but poor quality content will cost you. Churning out low quality, solely keyword driven, grammatically weak content, is an SEO no-no, and Panda will pick up pages that do not provide value to the human audience.
4. Spammy title tags – if you don’t optimise your title tags, you are missing out on the opportunity to provide useful information for people browsing your site and to tell search engines about the purpose / importance of your pages. But don’t make the mistake of writing spammy title tags that are simply a clumsy list of keywords!
5. Too many internal anchor text footer links – excessive internal linking with keyword stuffed anchor text can trigger an automatic penalty with Google. Internal linking is healthy for your site but don’t over optimise anchor text links in a sitewide footer which will cause your site to appear spammy.
6. Outbound anchor text footer links – irrelevant outbound anchor text links are unnatural and this can be considered to be very risky.
7. Hidden text on category pages – if your site contains intentionally deceptive hidden text, it could result in complete removal from the Google index. Hidden text can come in a number of different forms such as CSS, Flash or just making text and background the same colour on your pages, and although there are some legitimate uses for hidden CSS text, these practices should be avoided altogether.
8. Hidden text in small scrollable divs – scrollable divs are a great way of organising a content heavy page, but hiding too much text can be unfavourable to your rankings.
The bottom line is, “don’t spam”. Stay away from black hatting and try and apply a more holistic approach to your optimisation methods. White hat builds scalable results that can give you long term success and it doesn’t carry the same risks that spam does. We’ve all seen what Panda can do – whether you get found next week, next month or next year, internet spam will bite back eventually. It’s more important than ever to optimise websites for users, not just search engines. And this is exactly what some people have had to learn the hard way after the Panda Update.
Other things to avoid in your SEO strategy this year:
1. Little or no content – content is still king! Relevant and unique content gives your site the crucial page differentiation that it needs for Google to index the individual pages, increasing the chance of them appearing in the desired search results.
2. Content as artwork – Using content as an image on your homepage is a great way to create continuity in your web design, but static text doesn’t get detected by search engines. Use logos and brand strap lines in an image, but use keyword friendly content as uploaded text.
3. Unoptimised title tags – unoptomised title tags or duplicate title tags are simply unforgiveable and this is one of the most important parts of your SEO strategy. Make each page unique and differentiable so that Google can index and rank every section of your website.
To find out more about our SEO services, click here. Or read more about Google's recent Panda Update.
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