In the race to get to the top of Google’s rankings, many techniques and tactics can be utilised. The vast majority of them are legitimate and whether it is you who implement them or an SEO agency like SPE, none of them should cast you in a bad light in the eyes of Google. In fact, they are more likely to give your rankings a boost.
Unfortunately, not everyone plays by Google’s rules, and instead of following an SEO campaign that is whiter than white, they instead use blackhat tactics that seek to create a shortcut to high rankings. Frustratingly, some of these underhand SEO techniques work, but only temporarily, and as Google’s algorithms are so advanced, SEO spammers being caught is almost a certainty.
When Google does catch spammers it has several ways of punishing them, ranging from a drop in their ranking to delisting a website from their search results completely. if you are wondering how severe that is, it is the equivalent of a retail store being removed from the mall, or a commercial lawyer’s office being locked permanently, and the key being thrown away.
We must point out that there are occasions when a business will use SEO spamming inadvertently because they were either misinformed or simply were not aware that what they doing was wrong. Unfortunately, as with criminal law, Google’s law means ignorance is no defence, so to enlighten you somewhat, here are three SEO spamming tactics which you must avoid at all costs.
Backlink Spamming
Backlinks are a significant contributor to how highly a website ranks and that means they are a prime target for spammers to try and game Google’s algorithm. Google’s view of backlinks is that they should aid users’ navigation to other relevant websites and should not just be used to gain authority.
Specific spamming techniques include:
• Buying or sponsoring backlinks by offering money, goods, or services
• Backlink exchanges and link farms where irrelevant links are swapped
• Linking out to high authority websites that have no relevance to yours
• Using phrases such as ‘Click here’ as anchor text within links
• Using misleading anchor text to redirect to a website that the user is not anticipating
Using any one or a combination of the above will almost certainly see your website caught in Google’s spam filter.
Redirect Spamming
Whilst redirecting a user is legitimate in circumstances such as you having a new website domain name, their use should be limited. The reason is that redirections raise red flags at Google, and it will come down hard on those it detects using redirects to try to spam their algorithm. Examples of redirect spamming include:
Redirecting to a landing page instead of the homepage
Setting up multiple redirects from the homepage which are not required
Purchasing an expired domain that had high authority and redirecting from it
Spamming By Keyword Stuffing Pages
This is one of the oldest spam methods, it has been proven time and time again not to work, but incredibly some people still try their luck with it. As the name suggests keyword stuffing means having multiple instances of a keyword or keyword phase in content and within the metadata of pages, in the hope that Google ranks the page for it. The fact is it will not! Instead, what it will do is to place that page well down the rankings or possibly even delist the page.