By knowing “How to Ruin your SEO in 5 Easy Steps”, you’ll better understand some pitfalls to avoid – that could ruin your credibility in search results. There are some things you could do that would quickly change your rankings for the worse.
1. Write Horrible Titles
There are lots of factors to good search rankings, but none is more powerful than a good post title. This is the title for that page listing in search engines, and the keywords contained within it largely determine what search terms you’ll come up for. If you want bad rankings, just write bad titles! Don’t use keywords, use meaningless words, make the titles excessively long, and don’t explain what the post is about.
2. Link to Questionable Web Sites
Remember when your mother said “you’re only as good as the company you keep”? Google believes that too. If you want to start dropping down in search rankings, just link to questionable sites, like ones with spam, mal-ware, illegal software – even linking to places suspected of or associated with this kind of activity is enough.
3. Get Malware on Your Site
Online security is HUGE nowadays, and if you get malware on your site – you’ll be ripped out of the google index the same day! You’re visitors will even get a nice warning message is most browsers that says “this site is infected with malware!” All it takes is to have an old version of most anything installed in your site (wordpress, forums, scripts), and it’s a backdoor for spammers to break into your site, and install links to spam and malware sites. Don’t pay attention to security, and you’ll be on google black list quickly!
4. Excessively Link to Other Sites
If you have more than 50 links on a single page, google will suspect you of link stuffing, building a linkfarm, and a hundred other things. It’s healthy to link to your own content and other sites, but if you want to drop your SEO just link to dozens and dozens of pages and sites in your posts.
5. Build Unusually Large Amounts of Backlinks
As in the last point, if you want to drop SEO, just build 1,000’s of backlinks quickly! You still see services that will build “thousands of forum links” overnight, or tons of social media bookmarks. Nothing will put you in the sandbox or give you a google penalty quicker, than trying to game google by building tons of backlinks quickly!
IMO only #5 could “ruin” your SEO, #3 will temporarily block you, others are just “slow downs” on you way, not “ruiners”.
Right on JT. The last thing you want is to create a link farm, cloaked pages, have tons of links leaking PR, and poor on-page SEO.
I find many people get caught in linear thinking. So called SEO experts have a system that they use and believe that one size fits all. Although there are some best practices in SEO I think it’s very important to custom tailor each strategy based on the client’s objectives.
Thanks for sharing this tip, I know very little about SEO. And I think your tips are very important to me.
Thanks
Great article, but surely there are more than five ways to mess us your SEO! Any chance of extending it to 10 or more? 🙂
The malware warning is very true. Some affiliate plans unwittingly aid these malware companies in distributing their scumware. If you get hooked up with them and link to them you could have problems.