Beware of Common SEO Mistakes
Beware of Common SEO Mistakes
By Kevin John Lewis
As you’re aware, search engines don’t like people trying to trick them into giving them higher positions than they would naturally achieve with a webpage, so they have ways to automatically root out & penalize those websites that are using naughty tactics that are against their terms of service.
However, what you may not be aware of - is just how easy it is to make a simple mistake which may well lead the search engines to wrongly think you’re using these banned tactics.
These are three very common innocent mistakes that can cause search engines to penalize a website:
- Redirects
- text color
- Over optimizing
Redirects
There are many reasons you would want to re-direct single pages, or even entire domains. Still one of the most commonly used redirect is the meta refresh redirect. What many people don’t realize is that search engines frown upon the use of meta refresh redirects, because they’re too easily abused. In the past, meta refresh redirects were often used to try to trick search engines.
In order to stay on the right side of search engines when setting up a re-direct, you need a 301 redirect. the easiest way is usually to use a .htaccess file 301 redirect. There’s little need for me to go into much detail on setting up 301 redirects & how they work, as a search on Google for “301 redirect” will return lots of very good information.
Text Color
Most people are aware that trying to hide text on a page by setting it the same colour as the page background, is a tactic that may get a website penalized or even de-indexed, but what many people don’t realize is that it can be easy to give the search engines the impression you’re doing this when you’re not.
For instance - you have a white page background, with a table with a black background with white text. You’re not cheating, as the text is clearly visible to the visitor BUT some search engines spam filters may be tripped by this, as they will see a white font, and a white page background, but they will often not see that the white text is actually within a table with a dark background.
Over Optimizing
It’s sometimes easy to get carried away when doing SEO. Search engines look for natural use of keywords, in content & in meta tags. So if you go overboard, and use keywords in a way which looks unnatural, this may result in lower ranking. I’ve never seen a website de-indexed for being over optimized, but I have seen evidence where actually de-optimizing a site slightly that had unnatural use of keywords, has increased results.
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