Bad Content for Your Site

One thing that I try to emphasize as much as possible is the need for quality content. Quality content gets readers to sign up for your newsletter, subscribe to your RSS feed, and link to your site.  If you write something useful that provides excellent value and information to your readers you are going to benefit a lot more than if you write content that is low-quality.  What exactly do we mean by low-quality?  Here are a few examples.

1.  Duplicate Content - Some site owners out there fill up their site with articles written for the article directories.  These articles can be found using the exact same wording on several different sites, so why would someone link to the content on your site over someone else's?  Why should Google rank you higher than another source?  What's even worse is when you copy content from other site's WITHOUT the owner's permission or an attribution link.  Not only are you giving off low-quality signals about your site, but you are violating international copyright law and could face some hefty fines.

2.  Writing Content For Keywords - Most sites that know about SEO create content with the search engines in mind, but taking this to the extreme can cause problems.  The Panda Update hurt sites that wrote content centered around specific keywords.  These sites would pay writers to post quick, low-quality articles based on a specific keyword term with the hopes of achieving a high ranking.  The search engine users would click on this high-ranking article, see it's junk, and back out to find a quality source of the information they were looking for.  Finally, Google responded and harmed the rankings of sites that posted this kind of shallow content.

3.  Fake Reviews - This kind of garbage got to be so egregious that the FCC had to step in and require sites to post affiliate disclaimers.  Do not lie to or mislead your readers.  People are smart enough these days to spot fake testimonials and frown upon sites that use them.  Do not post reviews on products or services that you haven't personally used or know absolutely nothing about.  It's going to come off as weak.

4.  Unrelated to Your Product or Service - Google News can be a great way to drive traffic to your site, but a problem I have ran into when being listed in Google News is getting irrelevant traffic.  You start seeing a flood of traffic come in from a keyword that is on the fringe of what your site is about and it drives you to write content that is further and further away from your core in order to get more visitors.  The problem is that these visitors are going to be very low-value.  You don't get paid for visitors and pageviews.  You only get paid when people take action on your site.  Post relevant content with a clear call to action on what you want the reader to do next.  Posting an article about Charlie Sheen might get a lot of traffic, but won't get you many leads.

Link Building Schemes

Yesterday we touched a little bit on link building schemes in our article on black hat SEO techniques, but since most webmasters no longer participate in spamming their own site I thought it would be best to elaborate on some link building practices that could get you into trouble.

The reason link spam is so popular is Google requires a lot of quality inbound links to your site in order for them to list you high in the rankings for any sort of competitive keyword.  However, not all links are going to give you the same boost and some will even cause you to be penalized in the rankings. Let's take a look at the practices that I recommend you avoid.

1.  Reciprocal Link Pages - Having a "resources" or a "links" page probably won't hurt you in the SERPs, but it's not the best way to exchange links.  Google is going to stop looking at outbound links when you get past somewhere around 100 so on a single page.  If you have a huge, long list of links on your page it isn't going to encourage quality sites to exchange with you.  One solution is to create a resources page with a menu to additional links pages organized by subject.  The problem with doing this navigational trick is it pushes all of the outgoing links to a page deeper within your site, lowering their value.  This is not something "quality" sites are going to really look for.

Remedy: try exchanging links within articles and get rid of straight links page to links page exchanges.

2.  Irrelevant Sites - If sites in bad neighborhoods are linking to you, it probably won't hurt your rankings.  Google doesn't want to punish you for things you can't control and they don't want to give competitors a way to trash your rankings.  However, if YOU are linking to irrelevant sites that's a low-quality signal in Google's eyes.

Remedy: Eliminate links pointed to sites that no longer exist.  Do not link to sites that are out of your niche.  Think of your user ad ask yourself "would they find a link to that site useful?"

3.  Rapid Link Building - The pace at which new links point to your site can be an indicator of quality.  Sites tend to add links at a natural rate.  The fact that you get a whole bunch of links to your site in a short period of time isn't necessarily going to be bad for you, but it might warrant a closer look.  If those incoming links are sitewide or from low-quality sites, that's a low-quality signal.  If you had an article listed on the front page of Digg, you might get a lot of quality links from inside the content of big sites.  Those types of links are going to give you a huge boost.

Remedy: If you are trying to build your link profile up, do so at a constant, steady pace.  Getting a huge influx of links every 3-4 months and not seeing any next incoming links in between is a bad sign for your profile.

4.  Not Mixing Up Your Incoming Link Anchor Text or Landing Page - If you build links naturally to your site, you will have links with different anchor text pointing to different areas of your site.  People will use your site name, the actual URL, and keyword anchor text that isn't quite what you would hope for.  If you build 100 links to your site all with the same keyword rich anchor text and all pointing to the home page that looks unnatural and the search engines will discount them.

Remedy: Mix up the keywords you use for your anchor text and link deep into your site.

Other tactics are not necessarily going to hurt your rankings, but could be a giant waste of your time.

1.  Mass Emailing Link Partners - If you are sending off hundreds of link exchange requests to webmasters every day you are probably not going to get a great response.  It's kind of like cold calling and telemarketers, nobody wants to be hassled unexpectedly like that.

If you want more natural links then do what Google recommends, "create unique, relevant content."  This will give other webmasters a reason to link back to you.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

The search engines are in a constant fight against spam.  Spam makes users unhappy.  If users are unhappy they will stop using that search engine for their queries and the site will lose advertising dollars.  That is why Google issued their webmaster guidelines to make it real clear what was considered to be "black hat" or spammy in terms of getting your site to rank high in the results.

If you use black hat SEO techniques then you taking a gamble.  You might get some short term benefit by seeing your site rocket up the rankings, but once the search engines catch on to what you are doing you risk getting your site banned and losing all of your rankings as a result.  So, what exactly can get you into trouble?  Let's take a look.

1.  Keyword Stuffing - Do not try to use your keyword over and over again inside the content of your articles.  For this page I use the title "black hat SEO techniques" where it fits into the text.  I don't repeat the phrase over and over again in sentences that make little to no sense.  Keyword density is one of those factors that went out of the algorithms a long time ago.  You want to write your pages with the user in mind, using language that is as clear and concise for them to understand as possible.  Do not include a list of keywords at the bottom of your site or any of your pages.  I saw this a lot around five years ago but those sites are normally no longer to be found.

2.  Invisible Text - This practice is similar to stuffing because the invisible text is normally the keywords the writer wants the page to rank for.  What you will see happen here is if a site has a white background, they will make add text to the bottom of the page that is white as well.  This way it's invisible to the user but the spider's will still see it.  The programmers at Google are smart enough to detect this kind of nonsense, so if you are using invisible text on your site then you will be caught and your rankings will suffer.

3.  Linking Schemes - There are a ton of linking schemes out there and whether the tactic is classified as black hat or white hat isn't always clear cut, but is defined on more of a sliding scale.  You aren't supposed to buy links, but there is a big difference between buying through a network where your site gets linked to buy hundreds of different unrelated sites and paying someone to include a mention in a relevant article.  Do not build new sites full of thin content just so you can link back to your main site.  Reciprocal linking is supposedly frowned upon, but only if you are including hundreds of links on one page, linking to bad neighborhoods, or exchanging with irrelevant niches.  I haven't seen any problems related to reciprocal linking with sites in my own niche.

What tactics you employ to try and rank higher in the search engines is your own decision, but just remember they can and will penalize you if what you are doing appears to be spammy.