Avoid Seo Mistakes
Search Engines can track some common seo trick.
Avoid some common and costly mistakes webmasters make.
META Refresh
The META Refresh tag was used by spammers to create a keyword rich page that gained good rank and then redirect visitors to another page. Search engines quickly installed guards against this notorious spam technique. Since there are many everyday practical uses for this tag many webmasters will innocently sabotage their own rank.
Solution: Use either a 301 redirect OR a robots exclusion tag on the pages with meta refresh.
Cloaking
There is software that will enable you to serve different content based on whether your visitor is a browser or search engine robot. There is a sufficient amount of practical “good” use for this type of software - flash sites that need to describe their content to robots, sites that want to serve different layouts based on the visitor’s browser, etc. If you are thinking of using it - do your homework…. none of the software vendors can guarantee you won’t be penalized by search engines at some point.Solution: My recommendation would be “don’t use it”. Design your website for both humans and search engines. If you must use it don’t gamble with your primary income producing website. Use the software on an alternate site other… that way if you get penalized someday - you won’t loose the farm.
Multiple Domain Names
It is a common practice to register more than one domain and just point or “park” it to your website. You may have a just a few or hundreds. Under normal circumstances it is usually not a problem. Search engines see the primary website/domain and index it as such.Sometimes this is not the case if:
- You submit or link to your website using an alternate domain name.
- You purchased a domain name that was used (and indexed) by another website and point it to your website.
- Someone else links to you using one of your alternate domain names.
If a search engine happens to index your website using an alternate domain name it could lead to them think you have duplicate content and penalize your ranking.
Solution: A properly implemented “funnel redirect” or simply don’t point your alternate domains to your website.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content adds no value and does nothing to improve the quality of the search engines result pages. For this reason, duplicate web pages are often filtered out or de-listed. This is the exact reason many affiliate websites have a very hard time achieving any meaningful rank whatsoever. It is very easy for search engines to spot dupe content by comparing the links, file size, and recently Google™ has got a patent to filter using page snippets - which I suspect has been happening anyway.Solution: Use unique content. The effort and time to duplicate websites is not worth it… not to mention the penalty. Rethink your strategy and put time and effort in one website.
Hidden Text
Some people use hidden text - text that is very close in color to the background or positioned in hidden layers via CSS or even small images with keyword rich alt statements. If your page is found to be using these techniques, you may get removed from the search engine results. Generally, search engines are not real good at spotting these situations, however, if your competitor is using this technique you can report it and possibly boost your own rank by having them penalized. REPORT SPAM TO GOOGLE
Solution: You should be able to insert your keywords in the content and meta tags without needing to use this type of trick.
Keyword Stuffing
Ah….yes. Thanksgiving turkey and keyword stuffing…yummy. Using a keyword TOO much on your page may cause it to trip a spam filter and become useless. You may notice top ranking pages using the keyword much less than you, yet ranking better.Solution: Don’t be a glutton…use your keywords in the beginning of your title, meta and content. Use them in bold, alt tags, URLs, headings and especially in inbound links BUT don’t over use them. Check the top ranking sites for your keyword…. make sure your keyword density is not out of range in comparison.