In a new information age filled with Google Panda and Penguin updates, many of the SEO techniques that once increased a website’s search engine rankings will now reduce them. This is why it is so very important that you not use certain out-dated SEO strategies or else the rankings of your web pages might suffer.
Here are five harmful SEO strategies you should avoid:
Submission to Article Farms
It used to be common practice to submit your articles to many different article directories in order to build links and increase your search engine rankings. This technique is no longer a feasible option because of the Google Panda algorithm, which was created to stop this sort of behavior.
Submission to Link Networks
If you submit your website to a link network, you could damage your credibility with the search engine spiders. Because of the Google Panda algorithm, many websites have experienced decreased search engine rankings after submitting to these sights. It is best to get high quality links the old fashioned way by earning them with quality content.
Overuse of Keywords
This practice is also known as keyword stuffing. Once a popular black hat method of improving search engine results, this strategy will now cause your website’s rankings to be lowered because of the Google Penguin update. You should use keywords like regular words, and your written content should flow in a natural way.
Spamming Links
All links are not tread equally by the web spiders. Links coming from certain locations that are not topically relevant to your website will not increase your rankings, and if the spiders think that you could be a link spammer, you might not get the search engine results that you were hoping for.
Poor Content
In order to receive good SEO rankings, you must have good content. Your web pages need to be filled with relevant information that is unique to your website. If you do not have a large amount of high-quality original content, then you will probably not receive many favorable results by most of the search engines.
Basically, it all comes down to just being straightforward with your audience and knowing what kind of information that you need to provide them. Give people what they want, and they will reward you by reading your content and occasionally linking back to it. You should not attempt to cheat the system. You need to create great content and link to other places on the internet that are topically relevant to your website.
