Google has made some big changes over the past 2-3 years. SEO is not that easy as it was few years back. Now a SEO person has to be very careful while optimizing SEO techniques for a website.
Here are some SEO techniques that can harm your site and you should not use them in 2014.
Spammy Guest Blogging: Guest blogging has been a good way to drive traffic and sales. But over time it has become a spammy SEO practice. Google considered it a spammy technique because the companies main purpose of posting blogs is to gain more backlinks for their websites. Also, the content they publish is not high in quality or you can say to get a backlink they create low quality content and post their blogs on unrelated blogs.
You can still do blogging but make sure that it offers value to users not for SEO purposes. Make sure to post on relevant blogs and avoid using rich anchor text.
Article Directories: It refers to writing an article of 400-500 words for your online business and then getting them added to popular article directories. The purpose of article submission is to atrract visitors and build backlinks to your site.
On 30th January 2014 Google’s Matt Cutts told not to use article directory sites for link building strategies. “My personal recommendation would be probably not to upload an article there.”
This is because of low quality content uploaded on these directories for generating backlinks.
Link Exchanges: Link exchange is another way to generate backlinks with another sites. If you create good content that helps your site visitors you can use a link otherwise there is no need to use a link as it will be counting as useless and can be considered as a spam. A link should be used when it helps the visitor by pointing them to related resources.
Over-Optimization or More Backlinks: It has not been quite long when SEOs used anchor texts to improve their ranking but those days are gone. Now Google is preferring quality over quantity of your website backlinks. Now value from linkbuilding depends on authority and quality of your site.
Keyword Stuffing: It is a black hat technique used to overload a webpage with keywords. It is good if you can use synonyms of your keywords rather than repeating your keywords. Example: Instead of using “accommodation” 10 times, you can include “places to stay”, “find a home”, “rooms and hotels”.
There was a time when SEO writers focused on keyword density. They used to perform keyword density analysis to know the correct density percentage of their content. But today, your website content should be written for users not for search engines.
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