6 SEO Tactics to avoid in 2018

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can greatly help you increase traffic, improve your search rankings and overall make your site more successful.

It is a field that is constantly changing and evolving over time. Many tactics and strategies that used to work are no longer up to work in today’s online world.

Here are 6 SEO tactics to avoid in 2018.

1) Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is overloading the content or Meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword/phrase that relates to the site in many different forms.

It doesn’t work because when the search engine crawler examines your site, its algorithm can rapidly determine if keywords are used a number of times.

Don’t give in to the attraction to stuff your website full of keywords in an attempt to improve your rankings. The result will be the exact opposite of what you are trying to achieve.

Instead of stuffing it repeatedly into the content, you should focus on sub-topics and related ideas.

2) Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a huge topic in the search engine optimization (SEO) space. It is the content that is copied from somewhere else basically from different sites.

Google can take strict action against your site, up to removing it completely from their results if they sense you are trying to manipulate search results. It can also crush your SEO work you have ever done on your site.

In this particular case, the duplicate content would basically be seeing spam, and spamming is the reason your site would be removed.

Firstly, you should do is avoid creating it. But once you have it, there are ways you can do to reduce the burden on search engines and help your site be better indexed:

• Use permanent redirects
• Link to index pages the same way every time
• Use on syndicated content
• Provide a unique content

Another factor is the quality of content on your site matters. If you have old, low-quality content moving around, don’t ignore it. Chances are more that it’s hurting your search ranking, and dealing with it could give you quite a significant boost to your search ranking. The best way to measure the quality of your content is through user satisfaction.

3) Exact-match Anchor Text

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the anchor text help determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.

An exact match anchor text has the same keywords highlighted as the targeted keyword of a web page. They play a crucial role in improving your ranking, and they also could be the reason you get penalized by Google.

For example, your target keyword is “link building,” so your anchor is also “link building.”

Some marketers make the mistake of over-optimizing their anchor text, thus resulting in unnecessary penalties.

Now, Google more emphasizes on below-mentioned points rather than anchor text:

• Relevance of the linking website to your website.
• Authority of the linking website.
• Number of relevant links from authoritative websites pointing to your website.

4) Spam Comments

Comment spam is something that every blog has to deal with. It hurts the user experience, takes up space you need for other things, and can even adversely affect your ranking in the search engines.

Effects of Uncontrolled Blog Comment Spam:

• Decreases the quality of your website
• Reduces the quality of the user experience
• Breaks down your site in the long run
• Can affect search engine rankings

The only solution here is to do everything you can to stop spam comments from appearing on your blog, and more importantly to monitor the comments so you’re aware of when spam does eventually get through and can delete it.

5) Unnatural Links

Unnatural links are artificial links mainly projected to manipulate a page’s ranking.  These can include purchased links or links created by scrapers and spammers that attach themselves to your site under the radar and potentially link your site to another in a bad zone of the internet.

If Google is suspicious of a site they can take manual action, where a member of the support team manually delists the site from the search results.

When a warning is sent out to a site it is given a time frame of about six months to alter and delete malignant unnatural links.

After a site is tagged for unnatural links their rankings on search engine pages will generally decrease.

6) Intrusive Interstitial Ads

Intrusive interstitials are essentially popup ads. They tend to block most or all of a page, leading to a bad user experience for desktop and mobile users alike.

Google can be potentially penalizing, i.e., lowering the rankings of these web pages.

Google said, “Pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”

These types of ads make it frustrating at best to access the page as intended and ruin the user experience.

You need to check your interstitial ads and make sure they follow Google’s new guidelines.