The Most Harmful Practices That Can Kill Your SEO Results

The importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no news; web admins worldwide put their efforts into ensuring their websites stay at the top of the search results. Experience better growth and exposure through traffic generation with SEO for enterprises. Competitive and relevant keywords that give you better visibility and an edge over your competitors. However, the hard work sometimes doesn’t seem to be enough, and witnessing a sudden drop in your SEO rankings can be devastating. Since good SEO provides you with the most valuable organic traffic, you can’t afford to proceed with the following harmful practices that kill your SEO score:

1. Duplicated content
   SEO-friendly content is a must-have if you’re looking to rank high on the SERPs, and one of the best ways to ensure it is to provide unique and original content for your website. Since search engine crawlers will index each of your pages based on their content, they won’t need to index the duplicates because they have nothing new to offer. In case you need to have duplicate content because it might be helpful for your readers, make sure to add “no index” and “no follow” tags to those correspondent pages.

2. Keyword stuffing
   Managing keywords correctly can be useful to get your website a high ranking score, but if you go over the board by repeating the exact keywords over and over again, you’ll do more harm than good. Keep in mind that keywords should sound natural, so make sure to include them in the title, subheadings, description, and a couple more times. Stuffing your content with the same keywords will not only repel your visitors but also signal the search engine crawlers that you’re trying to manipulate their algorithms.

3. Inadequate guest posting
   Whether you give or receive guest posts, you need to make sure you’re doing it correctly. For instance, when you’re guest posting to get more links or to gain more exposure and recognition, make sure to do it only on high-quality websites that are closely related to your niche. Similarly, when you’re accepting guest posts, we strongly advise you to settle down for nothing less than relevant, original, and helpful content for your audience. Lastly, keep in mind that there should be a balance between the content coming from your website and the one coming from guest posts.

4. Too many ads above the fold
   This may or may not surprise you, but Google, for example, tends to punish websites containing too many ads placed above the fold. In case you’ve witnessed a sudden drop in ranking, make sure to check whether your site has too many ads above the fold.

5. Not checking for SEO spam
   Spamdexing, essentially SEO spam, can cause a lot of trouble if left unnoticed or neglected. Hackers use this black hat SEO technique to generate revenue from your website, and it is often so well disguised that you can’t tell it’s present. However, if you pay close attention to any signs, such as warnings in Google Search Console or a sudden drop in your website’s rankings, you’ll be able to use some of the available tools and clean the hacks from your site.