No matter how people try to frame it to you, SEO is not an exact science. Most of what happens with search engines is cloaked in secrecy and it’s perfectly understandable since search engines don’t want to be manipulated. There are still things we know for a fact that work and others that don’t, and some of the things that used to work before could suddenly become obsolete overnight. Not only will using these practices not get you any results, but it could completely ruin your search engine results. Here are some surefire ways to ruin your website’s SEO in 2022.
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Filling Your Copy with Irrelevant Keywords
If you speak with an SEO “expert” and they mention anything about keyword density, run immediately. There was a time when people thought that stuffing a page’s copy with keywords directly or loosely related to a page’s theme could help it move up the rankings and get more organic traffic from searches. There was also a belief that there was a magical number that would give you the best results. That number was around 2% to 5% depending on who you asked.
The reality is that while keywords are still important for search engines, keyword density will do nothing for your website’s rankings. Google mainly uses keywords to determine what your site is about. Keywords related to your niche should appear naturally in the text, and the text has to be pleasing to human readers. Engagement now plays much more of a role in SEO than static factors like keywords, so this is what you should focus on when creating your copy.
Spammy Links
Spammy links will probably get your website the axe faster than pretty much anything. This is another technique many so-called experts used to sell in the past. Many of them would sell link packages made up of mainly “high PR” junk and forum signature links. The technique worked for a while, but Google put a stop to that as it does with most manipulative tactics.
If you’re going to pay someone for links, make sure that they’re white hat backlinks. People offering this kind of service usually have access to a large network of editorial websites and will publish high-quality content on these resources. Your links will then be inserted in a relevant context. This will get you more visibility on search engines thanks to the quality of the links, but also traffic from readers.
Cloaking and Hiding Keywords
Deceptive tactics are also very likely to get your site de-indexed. One of these tactics is cloaking. This is when you use a false meta title and description to attract people on search results and send them to a completely different page. Another one is trying to hide keywords from someone in the site’s code. One common way to do this is to hide the keywords on the site’s background by making it the same color so it’s visible to Google bots but not actual readers. This might sound like a joke, but lots of people used to do this before and we don’t know if it worked or not, but we know it was popular enough for people to know about it. So, don’t attempt to trick search engines robots and focus on making your content relevant to your readers.
These are all things that you can do if you want to sabotage your website’s search engine results pretty quickly. We assume that you don’t want to end up on Google’s blacklist, so do the complete opposite and always stay abreast of the latest news, best practices, and updates.
