Bad SEO

DIY SEO Health Check-up

Our DIY SEO Health Checkup Series keeps on rolling, and with today’s installment we focus on some important Bad SEO techniques, (or ‘Black SEO’ as it is sometimes called) and other items to watch for.

More than 300 words

Well known in professional SEO circles but not as much to the general public is Google’s strong recommendation to have a minimum of 250-300 words on a web page. That means no pages with a ‘coming soon’ and no product pages which just have a small description, title and price, or any other kind of page where there are fewer than 250 words.

Check your website to see if any of your pages have this problem and then remedy it by having text written (text which is relevant).

Broken Links

Not only should your external links to other websites be working but you should take great care to make sure that ALL internal links in your website are functional and not broken. Website maintenance and upkeep are one of many factors in Google’s algorithm. Even if it is a small factor, every bit helps. And more importantly it helps maintain a pleasant user experience (as everyone hates clicking on a link which seemed to have the information they were looking for, only to get a 404 error!)

Hidden Text

Believe it or not there are still some people out there who engage in text and keyword hiding. Websites which have such content typically get an initial boost in Google but then a subsequent ‘banishment’ once Google discovers the text is hidden.

If you don’t know how to find out if you have hidden text on your website then you will need to hire a professional to lift up the hood and look through your code.

Link Schemes

Don’t ever buy into and be sold on complex linking schemes or campaigns. Google is fully capable of detecting triangular linking and additionally, has websites which are linked together grouped in ‘neighborhoods’. Traditionally, spammy and low quality websites use link schemes so therefore the fact that they all link together puts them into the same neighborhood. If your website participates in said linking network then you will also become a part of that neighborhood and your website can subsequently be lowered in the search rankings.