SEO Tips—What Not To Do
Many articles and blog postings tell you what you should do when it comes to SEO techniques. However, we are going to discuss some important SEO tips that cover what you should avoid so that you aren’t penalized in the search engine rankings.
Can They Really Take Away My SEO Positioning?
Search engines like Google, Ask, and Yahoo! rely on algorithms to determine what website goes where in the search engine results page, or SERP. Because some less scrupulous SEO services were using shady techniques to help their customers achieve higher rankings in the early days of search engine optimization, the search engines began to penalize certain methods used to cheat the system.
This being said, the temptation to use what the SEO services call Black Hat SEO may be strong, but in the end employing these tactics will wind up hurting your true SEO efforts.
It should also be noted that there are some things you should avoid when creating your page that won’t necessarily help your web site search engine optimization, but it will most certainly hurt it. These are:
- Duplicate content. Search engines hate duplicate content because it makes their spiders work harder. Each time the spiders index a page that is a duplicate one of them will suffer when it comes to the SERP. After all, why would they provide the same page to their users over and over again?
- Large sized pages. Again, this makes their spiders work harder. Too many images, over use of Flash, or anything else that makes a page take a long time to load should be avoided. In fact, it is predicted that Google will begin adding page load times into their algorithm to reward pages that load more quickly.
- Bad redirects. When a spider crawls your site it looks to see how you redirect in your htaccess file. If you use a 301 redirect, permanent, then you are not penalized. If your site uses a 302 redirect, for content moved temporarily, then you most likely will find your site punished when it comes to its SEO positioning.