Search engine optimization helps in optimizing a website to get unpaid traffic from the search engines. SEO basically involves making few changes to the website design and content, which helps in making your site more striking to search engines, but there are few things to consider while using SEO otherwise it can lead to penalties.
Few internet marketers try to optimize websites with outdated and forbidden SEO methods. It gradually damages the ranking, resulting in banning of the site by various search engines and can also lead to manual penalties. Therefore, be aware of the SEO mistakes that can penalize or ban your website.
Excessive joint or Buying links.
Buying links is against the policies because it is seen as an attempt to manipulate PageRank. That’s why, if you are buying bad links or a lot of links then stop doing it as soon as possible. It will come with a big setback for your site. There was a time when buying a link was considered as an ideal marketing tactic, until people started misusing or abusing it.
Now, purchasing links is considered as a violation of Google rules and is one of the top reason’s websites get penalized for. There are only two ways to get the links, one you can accomplish the links via valid link acquisition strategies or the other they should come naturally.
Linking to the homepage
Once again if it is done naturally then it is ok otherwise it violates the rules and attracts penalties. There is nothing wrong with adding homepage links into the backlink strategy but only if you have done it rightly. If you believe that acquiring more links on the homepage of your website will help in getting higher, then you are still living in 2005.
The strategies are changed and in the present scenario, Google doesn’t rank websites, it ranks pages. That’s why a link to the quality content within your website and not the homepage. If your website has a homepage and product landing pages only on your website, it’s time to revaluate your marketing plans. You can start a blog and generate good quality content that attracts people, this is the only way to add quality links on your website.
Linking with penalized sites or suspicious websites
You will never want to link your website with the penalized sites, to prevent that ask your Digital marketing consultant how they determine the sites to acquire the links from. And then understand how they scrutinized those sites? If they mention, they use the sites Pixelgroove or Moz for examining then you are likely in a good hand.
Penalty checkers can give you the indication of a penalty, but only a webmaster know if they have been penalized. It is also recommended to get a full list of links that have been acquired and check them independently on your own. After all, you will never want to link with ant site that is sandboxed by Google, these sites are sandboxed for a reason and linking with them will not help you.
While removing links from the penalized websites, also remember not to Link your website with suspicious sites. Linking to the suspicious sites will not only impact the reputation but it can also lead to penalties. The website involved in something unethical or legally dubious is a big no, in other words, Malware-ridden sites, hacking and porn should be avoided.
Duplicate content
This one is simple and obvious; duplicate content is never good for your website. Any duplicate content is considered useless data making your site less useful in Google’s eye which can result in a penalty. Never upload low-quality or duplicate content to get profitability, search engines de-index the websites with copied content from other sources. Therefore, a unique, high quality, plagiarism-free content is vital to maintain the reputation of your website in the long run.
Broken Links
Broken links referred to those links that take you nowhere or open an error page impacting the goodwill of your site. Therefore, you should be careful and keep checking your links using the tools to make sure your website is not owning broken links on any page.
If there are 404 on your website, users aren’t getting the information they are searching for which is a sure-fire signal for the website. The basic reason for these errors can be misspelled links, forgetting to change internal links, moving the webpage, and numerous other technical issues in building the links, ask your SEO consultant to check regularly in order to save the website from broken link and penalties associated with them.
Keyword domains.
Domain names are safe but domain names with keywords can be risky. It can lead to anchor text linking issue, if you repeatedly link to any particular domain, there are chances that Google may consider it as anchor text manipulation. If you use an exact matching domain, make sure it consists of adequately good content on it, otherwise, it will be considered as cheating. It can lead to penalties because it is considered as you are trying to fool people into clicking.
Linking the sites in another language.
This can also impact the traffic on your website because as per Google users prefer one language, so linking the sites from another language can create confusion as well as irritation in the user making it a useless effort. You may have an authentic link from your client in another country, yet it’s technically considered against you because it is useless from the reader’s perspective.
Other than above mistakes, Over-optimization, Content theft, Smuggled links, Duplicate metadata, slow speed etc can also lead to penalties. You should be careful, as you are already working hard to optimize your website and the last thing you can think of is a search engine to turn around and penalize you.
It generally happens because of the small things that you may have accidentally overlooked. Always remember, whether you implement SEO techniques by your own or hire a SEO consultant, use the best SEO service to protect your site from getting penalized.