Six SEO Techniques Which Will Destroy Your Website
July 8, 2009 | Barry Wise | Search Engine Optimization
91 Comments
1) Buy (or Sell) Links. OK, this one is tricky. If Google catches you buying links, you’re sunk. But couldn’t you just do it all sneaky so Google doesn’t notice? Probably, but keep in mind Google still hates it and will blast your site if they find out you’re doing it.
SOLUTION: Create awesome and compelling content so that people link to you naturally for free. It works, but it’s easier said than done.
2) Free Giveaways/Promotions. That’s right – Google will also penalize you for asking other blogs to link to you in a free promotion or giveaway. In their eyes it’s just like buying links. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Ask any blogger doing a promotion or giveaway for you to nofollow their links.
A former Google Quality Rater writes “If you publish a product review or giveaway and you don’t no-follow your links, Google will penalize both you and the company that sponsored your blog post.”
3) Uncloaked Affiliate links. Why does Google hate affiliates? It seems Google hates just about anything commercial – if it makes you money, Google doesn’t like it. Unless of course you’re paying Google, as in buying Adwords for PPC. Then they love you. Not cloacking your affiliate links can cost you in the SERPs. I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it.
SOLUTION: Cloak the links — 301 redirects work great — and nofollow them.
4) Linking to Spammy and Shady Sites. Watch those commenters you allow to place dofollow comments on your blog – if you get enough people linking to sites which sell Viagra and pr0n via hacked links you’ll get slammed for linking out to bad neighborhoods.
SOLUTION: Moderate your comments, nofollow links, or both. Others more experienced than I have blogged about it.
5) Inactivity. The search engine landscape is changing all the time – if you’re not constantly working on promoting or building your site chances are it’s going to slip in the SERPs. You can’t just put up a 5 page brochure/pamphlet site and expect visitors to find you. You have to work at it.
SOLUTION: Work at it.
6) Duplicate Content. OK, this one won’t destroy your site, but it’s not going to help it any. If your site suffers from internal duplicate content issues search engines may not be returning the pages you want visitors to see. If your site has duplicate issues with content previously published on other websites, you may not appear at all.
SOLUTION: Nofollow links to duplicate content, block it in robots.txt, and/or use the new Google Canonical tag to specify the authoritative source.
Tags: barry wise, google, marketing, Search Engine Optimization, search engines, seo, website, yahoo
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91 Responses to “Six SEO Techniques Which Will Destroy Your Website”
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Hi Barry, good post. I’m not sure I 100% agree with #2, as I think that if you’re not blatant about “link to me to enter promotion”, you can do giveaways and contests – people will naturally be inclined to link to you, but you have to be careful how you position it.
@Claire, that’s probably true – as with just about anything else, it depends on how you position it. But if you’re actively seeking promotion partners with big headlines like “Free Giveaway” it’s best to request they nofollow the link.
Good points to consider. Thanks!
Mark
#1 – Just make sure bought links are not a majority of the links you have to your site. if you have 5k natural links to your site 10 paid links won’t be doing any damage to your site. But if you’re new and have very few links, those same 10 paid links could kill you. Mix your linking portfolio up with articles, PR, paid links, and other contributions such as social media avenues.
#2 – Um, Guy Kawaski doesn’t seem to have this issue. Make sure you only link to sites that you have reviewed and consider a value to your user base. Nofollow the sites you link to that are not a value, and you’ll be fine.
#3 – Plenty of affiliate sites are being successful without using cloaked or redirected URL’s. You have to provide unique content in order to provide value to the search engine users. If the content you use is the same content that’s on every other website, you won’t be competitive in that market.
Google just doesn’t want tons of similar sites that all say the same thing, clogging up their index. Provide a unique personal touch to all of your content and you should be able to compete in any industry.
@SanDiegoSEO I’ve got some experience with #2 which penalized a few sites for awhile. I don’t mean paid reviews; I mean free giveaway promotions. For #3, I’ve also had some experience watching sites gets penalized when link cloaking was removed. It may be enough now to nofollow the link, but Google hates affiliates – I wouldn’t take the chance of not cloaking them.
I am not sure if Google operate differently in the U.S., but here in the UK I know a lot of people who have done pretty much nothing but buy links and they have been ranking tops for years. Look through there links and its all blatant paid links. Look at any other competitive terms: web design, gambling and insurance and its all paid links.
How do you watch sites get penalized? Do you just watch SERPs carefully or is there a better way?
@David; they don’t spot all of them, but if they do, it will hurt a site’s trust rank in Google.
@Nicky; keep an eye on the SERPs and your keyword traffic. If your traffic drops, analyze which keywords changed position and why. If your site is penalized, you’ll see a very dramatic drop.
ad 3.) Google doesn’t even like affiliates when they pay for Adwords. Many PPC marketers resort back to Yahoo search marketing and even Miva.
Yours
John
I’m not sure about #2. bankaholic.com ran a series of promotions and giveaways. Ended up beating bankrate.com for some very competitive terms. Bankrate.com ended up buying them.
Maybe theirs went unnoticed because a variety of activities earned points in a drawing.
Thanks for this information, it has been great for further SEO work. I especially liked your section on “Free Giveaways/Promotions” it has cleared up this issue for me.
SEO is a great way of having an edge over your competitors. These techniques are really helpful in getting website traffic to your site in a safe way.
I think you might have missed the point of #2 bankman. It’s not running contests that is a problem, it’s asking people to link to you as the entry method they dislike.
I think there is another way around #3. I simply use “no follow” tags to stop this from happening. It’s very effective for this purpose alone.
Good post – thanks for sharing.
To be honest, amongst sites we take on #5/#6 are generally the most prevalent, and seem to primarily occur from lack of direction and poor planning!
Often one of the best tips we give our clients is to write a “plan of attack” for getting their website “out there” and/or “up there”!
Barry, as usual an interesting read.
In regards to #2 does all kind of link baiting fall under this umberella?
Hey Barry,
Nice to see your are back!
I agree with #2 I know in many cases companies pay popular bloggers to post good reviews about their products on their blogs and also link to them. This highly displeases Google. I have seen it happening too. It happens big time with cosmetics and skin care products.
Wow what a great post. I didn’t realize that cloaking your links is so important, but it definitely explains how a buddy of mine jumped up in the SERPs for doing this. He just wanted an easy way to track site exits. Turns out he got more than that. Great post!
Link baiting on sites is a touchy issue but if you look at the issue clearly you’ll see that the nofollow requirement is the best solution.
Anyone who argues about having to nofollow promotional links is basically admitting to trying to purchase SERP importance rather than relying on true testimonials for the straight traffic.
Google keeps telling us that content is king yet there always seems to be those who don’t believe them.
I try to emplane to my clients that a new website is like opening a shop miles out in the country side. When they hire me as a website designer, I build them a site that they need to tell people about and the best way to do it is to get links to their websites from similar types of sites. I also STRESS to them that they must change their content from time to time, preferably around 1 time per month as the internet is built on sharing new information. Some people listen and action these points and make a good success of their websites… other people dont .. and i dont need to tell you what happens to their websites.
The points you have above are a great pointer to people who don’t have much of a clue were to start when it comes to owning a website and they are also idiot proof enough enough for the people too… well written and it is a good read.
“If you publish a product review or giveaway and you don’t no-follow your links, Google will penalize both you and the company that sponsored your blog post.” – Good luck enforcing that. There are perfectly good reasons why you might have talked about a product and linked to somewhere where you an buy that product. Google doesn’t know whether you’ve been given that product or bought it yourself and decided to talk about it on your blog. To blanket say “you must no follow” is ridiculous.
Sooner or later all the scaremongering will end up with everyone nofollowing links, which then devalues the whole system and creates even more problems…
I think the most important ones are the last two. Google prefers updated sites. This is a big issue. I would recommend updating 1 article per week. This is to keep you in the safe zone. Duplicate content falls into the same category. If you want to use it at least spin it. All it takes is 5-10 mins per article. Trust me it will go a long way.
Another great post on the inner workings of the blogosphere. You make google out to be sort of a big bad sheriff, which I guess is not all that far from the truth. It’s tough to police a world without any hard and fast rules, but I guess Google has earned its right by dominating the search market.
Thanks Barry – I especially liked the tip about cloaking affiliate links. I never thought about google not approving of affiliate links, but I guess at the end of the day it’s competition for them?
Regarding paid links – here’s how you can report them to google now:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/
I wasn’t aware that affiliate links could be a problem. I sometimes use them, usually amazon links for books I review, but I use the affiliate link. For one thing, I want readers to understand that it is an affiliate and not feel “tricked” into using it. How can I balance being honest with readers and pleasing google?
Would also definately stress the importance of updated and fresh content. As soon as you have people linking to you naturally you’re know your content is good.
Interesting point about the cloaking of affiliate links though.
Where can I find out some info about sandboxing and how to get around it?
THxs
I agree, the free giveaway promotions has been getting some sites slammed by Google. Didn’t Michael Gray & Matt Cutts battle it out at a conference recently about this very subject?
It makes sense that giveaways where the organizer asks for a dofollow link back to their website would be penalized. Bribing someone for links is just as bad as buying them. As for Affiliate links, though, I would agree with Joanie above – it seems like Google would rather webmasters mislead their readers in a way by cloaking links rather than just be honest about where they’re about to be taken.
Nice post Barry. I think I remember David Airey or someone getting in a lot of trouble with a contest he ran and asked for people to link back to him…it seems that if you are run a prominent enough website, Google will catch you. I guess there are subtle ways of asking people to link back to you for contests without saying it outright.
Nice post. I agree , Google hate paid links. Nofollow the sites you link to that are not a value, and you’ll be fine. Google main motto is “content is king” . So we concentrate in that to improve website. Thanks for sharing the valuable article.
very useful post, please dont ever do number 6.
Do not duplicate content, it will hurt your google pagerank and you will be penalized. Your pagerank will drop and you will lose all your seo hardwords
Wow this is a big subject and we all need to tread carefully. I personally DO NOT want to upset Google in any way..They are supplying me with the traffic to make money with..Without it my site is dead. This is why they are the rulers and will be as long as they keep giving me the traffic.
Nice tip about the affiliate links. I will check my sites.
Great to hear I’m not breaking any of the 6….well at least right now. We probably do get into some trouble with duplicate content based on our article marketing submission to multiple services.
Excellent post, very informative ..
I totally agree with you in all the points except the one about Duplicate content .. it’s proven now by seo gurus (jill from highrankings) and I saw also some articles on seomoz about it .. Duplicate content is a myth ..
But yes, it will not help either ..
Keep up the good work!
Wow! these are very nice tips. I didn’t know that Google will also penalize you for asking other blogs to link you in a free promotion. There was a blogger who asked me to link his blog like this. Good thing I’ve read your post. Thanks a lot!
I have never seen anyone actually punished for giveaways on the blog, are you certain about this?
The tip for duplicate content is really good. Just add some nofollow tags =D
It may be best to hide affiliate links, but I have had sites with great rankings and unhidden affiliate links.
Adding too many incoming links too fast could destroy site. A year ago I bought cheap seo service. Two weeks later yahoo site explorer says my site has 4k incoming links – from guestbooks and forum profiles. Another week later my site gets filtered by google and is filtered to this day.
Giveaways can be okay, it all depends how you go about it. If your giveaway follows some of the normal giveaway strategies that seem really spammy, then Google might be able to pick up on it. But if you’re geniunely offering something of value to your visitors (and NOT an eBook!!), then it’s fine.
Duplicate content is one to be careful about though, your sites can often have duplicate content (your CMS), and you may not even realize it. This is an easy one to overlook, but worth the time to make sure the right pages get the right rankings.
“Linking to Spammy and Shady Sites.”
That’s a tricky one for do-follow blogs like my own. Obviously I don’t approve a comment (or allow it to be do-follow) if the URL being linked to is not something I want to be associated with.
But, you can’t keep an eye on all links forever, so in X months, some of your links you previously approved, might have sold their website or changed their content to sell viagra or something else/worse.
I guess that’s just a chance one must take, when enjoying the benefits of being a do-follow blog.
Thanks for the warnings, getting your site in trouble with the search engines could really hurt business.
Really great info, I know about keyword stuffing which will surely destroyed your website. Thanks for info
Number 5 leaves me in a sticky situation as my site is nearly complete and won’t need updating more than once every few months. =/
Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it’s essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn’t in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.
Hi Barry.
Thanks… some good helpful info here on avoiding common pitfalls. I especially like your solution to #1 which is something we have been doing well at. Creating a blog and keeping it regularly updated with some really worthwhile info that your site visitors will find interesting seems great for attracting natural links. I agree though its not always easy to come up with new info and to keep it interesting. Guest contributors we have found can help with this though if you are determined to really push forward and get a high ranking blog… Pushing it out into Blog directories can also help with getting it found and linked to.
The cloaking affil links was useful to me since I run a couple of sites which have quite a few affil links on them so will look at setting up some redirects… the link you put there seems most helpful on that… thanks.
Joe
Hi,
related to issue 3, if Google doesn’t like commercial websites I think they would be in the wrong business (Adsense, Adwords???) – but I think it is not that way. Google dstinguishes between good commercial sites (offering added value to the user) and the MFA sites which Google really not likes!
i already knew all of this points and still i can’t help bu being struck at the power Google has got during these years. is it possible that we, bloggers, can NOT have any form of extra income apart from being affiliate to Google Adsense? True, there are other ads programs but guess what? Google says to you: ” yes you can do it, but you have to behave like that, you have to put nofollow, you have to do this and that” i really do not like this. Is it possible that if somebody asks me for a paid review, where i give my honest opinion about the product i am reviewing, i have to follow Google guidelines and and the end of it all, still wondering if i did the right thing and hope not to be penalized???
This is an excellent post but I will have to disagree about your point regarding updating your website. I think it definitely depends on the type of website. If it’s a blog then yes, you do need to update it frequently. However, there are many commercial sites there are completely static and manage to rank very well with no significant updates to content or additional pages. If the content is strong and the brand is fairly strong, updating frequently is not always a requirement. -Dave
Barry, totally agree with the canonical stuff and splitting link juice between dupe content.
It’s low hanging fruit you can look for early and have big wins right off the bat with client sites.
Cheers!
Good tips, I wish everyone on the internet followed these.
These are all great points that people should adhere to when doing SEO. As you said though, if you follow these guidelines alone, you will have a difficult time ranking well in a competitive vertical. You would have to be extremely successful with Link Baiting to compete.
Great advice. I haven’t tried the Canonical tag yet, I guess I’m going to have to give it a try. Thanks.
I totally agree with you Barry., but I have a question on how SE’s treat product listing details in terms of duplicate content penalty.
We do receive several SEO requests from clients who owns websites built with shopping.com API’s and similar stuffs, but we refuse to work on them.
An example of our client use to have a shopping.com clone script. he came to us for SEO and when we analyze site we found it’s all duplicate contents as script doent allow to modify contents, they pull directly from shopping.com and display in product listing.
Also some times it’s really hard to modify a content such as specifications, features of a cell phone supplied by manufacturers. It should be used as it is?
So we suggested a client to modify the script and he agreed with us (he also collected views from top SEO companies before that), instead of using an API script he went for an custom comparison engine. but it cost him huge (Time and Money)again cost of writers writing description is high, huge cost on adding product to database, and management cost.
Bit confused on duplicate content issues! :p
I didn’t know that using uncloaked links might harm your search engine rankings…
Quite interesting
I think i am going to run a few tests about it and see myself as well :)
It is much easier;-)
just ad this
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
to you robots.txt
1) Buy (or Sell) Links
Google is the world’s biggest broker in the link selling business (Adsense).
I find this hugely ironical and I am looking forward to the day when Google has a worthy competitor.
Great points there Barry. Inactivity is one that isn’t given too much exposure but I totally agree, consistent working at great content and publicising it through social media means there is always something that can be done.
Don’t try to trick search engines using shady SEO techniques. This will not only bring negative reactions by your visitors, but also will hurt your rankings badly. You may lose your domain name, your business and your reputation.
Great tips. The major problem in the SEO game is that Google is is an umpire and player at the same time.That is not fair.
On point number 2, would running contests on your website be considered as a promotion that would destroy your page rank?
Barry,
Wow, it seems like it is so easy to screw up with google when it comes to seo. Is the concern only when you link to lower PR sites? For example, if my affiliate links are going to a higher PR site will google penalize me for that?
I have a few affiliate links on my site, but they are to well established companies that provide products and services related to my blog. I have tagged them as “nofollow,” but now it appears that just doing this is no longer enough.
Brad
Glad to see you didn’t flip out and say duplicate content is a horrible thing like the rest of the internet. Seeing as this post is rather old, and Google recently announced that duplicate content does indeed not harm you, I applaud you for intelligence.
Where is “buying a really crappy domain” on the list? Some clients have godawful domains yet expect ranking for opposite phrases….
Nice points Barry,
I would agree with all of them, especially the link buying, however A LOT of people still engage in this tactic…My view is that is isn’t worthy the risk..
I agree with adding the no follow attribute to affiliate links but I am still undecided on cloaking them… Might that be percieved as an effort to dupe Google? Even with a 301 redirect?
Cheers for the post
Hi Barry
Its interesting to see which websites sell or buy links. G-man seems to ignore certain authority sites that are in essence selling links to advertise you products or services, yet do nothing to them.
For example, Ezine articles, you can buy their premium monthly package, although I am not sure why for $100 buck per month, then in essence you are paying for a link – right?
Yet, I doubt Google is going to penalize them. On the other hand, if G finds a blog farm, they will hit their re-index button and poof, all that hard work is gone.
The duplicate content issue – well I have tested this out, more so because when I first got started in SEO, I didn’t of course understand things and got bad advice from a so called expert. I set up 150 blogger accounts under 1 account and was put multiple articles in say 10 to 20 of the blogs. Then submit another article to another series of blogs within my system. Well Google only indexed maybe 4 or 5 of the total.
I deleted all but 1 of the blogs and kept the original which seems to be fine and giving some back links. But it was a real learning experience because I wasted a large amount of my time.
While you don’t get penalized for duplicate content from what I have seen, its not helping you either to rank higher in the SERP’S.
Regards
Hi Barry,
I just entered the SEO/webmaster field and thought I had read all the relevant info on the internet about SEO mistakes. Well, this post was different. Well done. Does Article Marketing to a bundle of directory sites count as duplicate content? I would love to see an answer on “Duplicate Content” in a future post.
These are a great list of SEO tactics to avoid. There is no automatic and easy way to gain fist page rankings. It takes a decent amount of time and a lot of hard work. Trying to outsmart Google, wont work. Good SEOs learn internet marketing strategies that work with the search engines without violating their terms of service.
I have experienced #6 and can tell the story. My client simply wanted to have the same content on a different domain with the appropriate country TLD say original was on .COM and client felt it would be good to have it also on .CO.UK but did not want a redirect since there were plans to have some info not duplicated. Google simply took the one that was created earlier and simply redirected every search for the second to the first. When I did a SITE:seconddomain.tld it would bring up the first domain entries.
I then changed about 30% of the text, i.e. switched word positions, cases and replaced some words and eventually Google recognized it as a separate website.
nice points and thanks for sharing… although i think it is unfair of google to sell ppc and all and not let us buy links … but then again its they who make the decisions :)
Thanks for the tips. It is definitely getting tougher to move up the ranks for the smaller sites. There is so much competition out there and its very tough when you are just starting out. If you are well established and have tons of links already it becomes much easier as others naturally link to you (but it still doesn’t mean you have control of anchor texts). As you say, it takes a lot of work and you have to keep at it and monitor your results too.
The buying/selling of links and linking out to bad sites like porn, warez, etc. are pretty much the top 2 reasons why websites get destroyed by Google. Almost every website I have seen get destroyed, the cause was one or the other or even both.
Google hates anything that does not make it money
Extremely helpful information. Thank you!
Hi Barry
I Agree with #1#3 and#5 definitely buying links is illegal in terms of Google and some search engines.
most webmasters or SEOs who tells linkbuilding for cheap will use cloaking(inserting invisible text(that wont appear to normal user) or keyword stuffing)which will gain traffic or backlinks initially but will get penalized for sure I remember working on a clients website who got huge traffic in the first quarter of the year(2008) but was soon penalized by Google they are not in SERPs for one year and they lost traffic and trusted backlinks then we need to write a letter to Google for re listing its really a big mess now they are getting listed but once the trust is lost then no matter how hard they try it wont work.
Cheers
I agree that the linking out to poor sites (porn/warez) etc. will get you penalised but I think that the link buying debate is not a black and white one. If it was this easy to get a site banned by buying links you would have unscrupulous website owners buying links for a competitor and then reporting it to get the competitor penalised. Google do penalise for it, certainly, but I think that it’s not as frequent as many people make out.
SEO is an art and blackhat SEO is a science. I have found over the years that if you build links slowly. 2 or 3 links a day. Google doesn’t even bother checking out if your site is legit or not. The stealth linking approach is the best one. But it demands allot of time and patience. If you use link exchange sites be careful to whom is linking to you. If a web page with 300 links is linking to your site you will see your Google ranking drop from a couple of pages. So concentrate your efforts on high pagerank backlinks. I have found that a single pagerank 2 backlink makes you gain at least 50 positions on Google. Hope these tips will help you out.
On #1 are some of the top directory’s selling links for example Yahoo directory charges 299.00 and business.com directory charges 2999.00 to add your site. are these not 2 of the most trusted?
For issue #4, you can either just turn off commenting all together or leave up comments for moderation. This works well for my particular website as all I get sometimes are spam comments.
Many may disagree with me but I see buying links as an unfair way to build link popularity. Those who don’t have a budget are at a major disadvantage to those big corporations who have huge budgets for their link campaigns. I’m glad that Google frowns upon those who buy links, +1 to the little guy.
Digging up the high-page-rank places to put your back links is really key to this effort. At least Google is trying to keep the playing field equal… The only way to the top is by hard work and not by engaging in pseudo-spam techniques.
Thanks!
Great post. It’s interesting how Google continues to claim paid links are bad but wont give a definitive answer on directory submissions. I find most of the time if the directory is respectable and human edited, it is worth a link. Some small directories are indexed by Google rather quickly and do provide some good links, so buying links isn’t all that bad. But it’s true, content it king.
The last two tips are very much true. SEO is a continuous process and some websites stop when they’ve reached the first of second pages of the major search engines. This can make the SEO efforts go to waste. Doing maintenance once in a while is best.
buying links actually is not so harmfull practise if you pick up properly the donors properly. And don`t forget about contexual links – aren`t they really natural?
I think that the quality of contents, quality of links, quality of “good neighbours” are essential not only to have a good page rank, nut also for our reader’s FIDELITY.
This is great to create a good, qualitative, product.
Buying links is not honest.
You forgot another pretty big one…using Web Position Gold, Arelis or any other automated SEO tools, I once got banned for 6 months because of automated queries…never again!
hmmm i remember commenting about this post and how i used your advice to improve my seo. its gone MIA now ?
I have only just set up my blog but I’ve been doing some commenting just over the last day and have seen sites with so much spammy comments is unbelievable. I don’t actually have a comments section on my blog. Perhaps I will change to Word Press instead.
re: #5 Constantly adding to your website seems to be the nexus of blog inflation as posts and comments expand like the big bang, all in a race for SEO competition. I doubt that’s what Google intended but that’s what is today’s reality.
I didn’t know Google was that strict when it comes to ranking the sites! Thanks a lot for bringing that up. I’m definitely going to monitor every single step closely when I launch my blog!
By the way, what do you mean by “use the google canonical tag”? I’m sorry,I’ve never heard of that before!
Kind regards