Google is the god of search and SEO marketing strategies. Any business that does not see that is doomed. With its recent Panda and Penguin updates, Google has specified certain SEO behaviors that it will not tolerate and which will result in severe penalties for those companies that try and force the issue.
Before Google stepped in several years ago, SEO marketing was a wild and bloody brawl. It was a slugfest in which there were few winners. Even those that seemingly won, actually lost. Search became a disaster for users. The web has become a sophisticated marketplace these days and there are new algorithms and new rules that will give potential users only the best possible choices available in their SERP. Of course, there are tactics that are no longer permitted.
Certain SEO strategies are known as “black hat” strategies. These are used because the marketer cares nothing for rule; only for rankings. They may work for awhile, but Google will catch up. When it does, it will plummet your rankings to page 16 if you are lucky. Most probably, however, your company will be entirely banned from coming up in any manner of search query.
So, what do you need to avoid doing?
- Believe it or not, keyword stuffing continues to be used. It has long been a red flag for Google and those that engage in it rarely come up in search results. The main problem that this presents is that your content tends to be so stuffed with keywords and long tail phrases that the content is nearly unreadable. Engaging and regular quality content is one of the hallmarks of a site that Google looks for in search results. No matter what tricks you try and use to undermine this approach, the search engines are far too sophisticated these days to be fooled any longer.
- Links continue to be an area of concentration for your SEO marketing as well as the search engines. Buying links is done but severely frowned upon as is the ages old bait and switch routine designed to garner links. In the bait and switch, a company will build a legitimate site and will, over time, garner some credible links. Then, they will eliminate the content at the site and switch it out with content that is likely entirely promotional in nature. Google sees this, as well as buying unrelated links, and these sites lose credibility, and rankings, almost immediately. The purchased links will be low quality and Google’s Penguin update is the final word on non-quality links.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
SearchPro Systems
2024