Are Your SEO Methods Spammy?

Optimizing your blog for SEO has never been any easier. On the other hand, getting the desired results has never been any harder. The competition is incredibly tough these days and Google, whose trends everyone needs to follow, is quite harsh when it comes to punishing those who are trying to abuse its ranking system.

So what are some of the spammy methods that are likely to be punished by Google and other search engines?

In this article, we are going to look Are Your SEO Methods Spammy? :D

Are Your SEO Methods Spammy?

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is one of those things that Google have been warning about for quite some time already – and, as many webmasters and bloggers have already found out, the search engine can indeed punish you very harshly for that tactic. Keyword stuffing is the practice of trying to place as many keywords as humanly possible on a page, no matter whether it makes sense to do so or not.

It goes without saying that overdoing it when it comes to keywords does not bring anything to the readers and visitors of the website – so why should it count for anything in terms of search engine rankings?

Avoiding Anchor Texts Over-Optimization

Knowing how to link webpages through the right anchor texts can be very beneficial to the search engine ranking of any given webpage. The thing is, it is not that great to over-optimize things by trying to manufacture keywords and anchor texts that just are not relevant to what the webpage is about.

Think about it as an exercise. If someone had to connect your webpage with a list of anchor texts, what words would he or she choose? It is easy and simply – just don’t forget to go through with those words. The key rule one has to follow here is staying as relevant as possible. Irrelevant keywords and anchor texts simply are not going to get you anywhere.

Duplicate Content

Just a few years ago, copying content and having poorly-written texts on webpages was quite okay. In fact, many webmasters were more than happy with hiring poor copywriters or even with just duplicating content without any shame or regrets. However, those days are gone. These days, trying the very same strategies can lead to a very quick fall of rankings when it comes to search engines.

In all honesty, Google has really stepped upped its efforts in this particular department. Fortunately, it is quite easy to avoid getting punished by Google – all one needs to keep in mind is that quality is worth more than quantity. Hiring good writers is one of the best and most obvious solutions.

Bad Linking Practices

And, finally, let’s also talk about what simply does not work in the world of linking practices. One thing that can really hurt the search engine rankings is the participation in various link schemes. Yes, that’s right – the practice that was considered to be okay a few years ago is not that great anymore. And it is not only about excessive link exchanging – far from it. It is also about trying to create multiple webpages in order to cross-link between them, linking to unrelated and irrelevant sites, and trying to gain additional links in the form of comments with optimized links.

It is also not a good idea to think that you can get anything from the so-called cloaking practice. What you are showing to the users should be exactly what you are showing to the search engine crawlers. So no, trying to show HTML code to the crawler instead of the animation that visitors get to see is not going to get you anywhere either.

Summing Up

At the end of the day, it is clear that it is getting harder and harder to trick Google into thinking that you have a better site than you really do. The best strategy to get a high search engine ranking is to simply focus on the over all quality of the website. Using clean and simple SEO strategies is still a great way to improve search engine rankings, but it is much better to invest one’s time into making your blog better than into trying one’s luck with shady methods.

 

25 thoughts on “Are Your SEO Methods Spammy?”

  1. Google spam your website if you using techniques like keyword stuffing,over optimization and bad linking..Always try to avoid these.

  2. I always do Keyword Stuffing to increase my Keyword density and ranking. Understood that, it hurts the Blog, will stop it by now! Thanks for mentioning! Google is becoming clever day by day and introducing new methods. Have to be serious from now :D Cheers.

  3. Hi,
    Excellent post. I think that most of the SEO experts are using spam methods and they do not what is a quality back links. All of them are just using wrong link building methods to get rankings.
    Google is clever now !
    Thank you

  4. Hi Kostas,

    Thanks for sharing nice tips. I found it very helpful to everyone, especially ME.
    I will try to work with your tips and do my best to make things possible.

    This such an amazing post!

  5. Great article reminding us of the basics! Though it border on reinforcement I still walked away with valuable information, especially the one about ” Avoiding Anchor Texts Over-Optimization..”

  6. Thanks Kostas Chiotis for one of the nice post about SEO Guideline and tips to check personal SEO methods, are they spamming or organic. It’s really amazing and one of the post which is 100% out of the box for some common SEO points and tips.

    @Bilal Shafi: Yes I agree with you.

  7. Hi ,

    Nice tips. Your point about anchor text is important to understand. It is showing the rise of guest blogging in the modern search. Most guest blogging chances provide anchor text in the byline and this is the best way to avoid spammy methods

    1. Thanks for your comment Okto, actually about guest posting the use of authorship markup can really help in getting the most of your efforts, take a look on a post I recently published on my blog about Google’s AuthorRank…

    1. You are right Abu, actually it’s not just about the SEO, I mean when we write an article I guess we wouldn’t like to find it to another blog without atleast getting the credit…

  8. It is good tips for every blogger and online business owner. I know very well keyword is very important for our SEO. but I am always confuse which type keyword Important for my blog. can you give me suggestion about keyword suffering.

    1. Hi Rahul, I am not sure what you mean about the types of keywords, just write articles natural and unavoidably you will use your keywords, the only thing that you might have to do is add h2 , h3 tags with variations of your main keywords…

  9. Oh one thing from above article i missed in my blog.But know i’m going to right it and hope that Google will spare me :-)

  10. hi ,now i have doubt :)
    i using so many tags on my post (minimum 7/post)from google suggested words.what is your opinion about this practice?may i get punish from google? if yes how can i play with tags in a proper manner?my question is how many tags can i use /post?
    so happy xmas ammar!!!!

    1. Well I don’t think that there is any problem if you use many tags on your posts however try to avoid adding too general tags and focus on those that are really relevant to your post…

  11. i am 90% agree with you, because a bit confused in content copyingrewriting, turn-init one of the best software of checking pledgarism, all of the institute are using turn init for pledgarism cheking. Google translator and Microsoft is working with this software.but the thing i noticed here is that they are also fail in catching of any article that was spinned,synonym or rewrite.so how can we say that Google will catch you.i saw soo many website that are using spinner but if we check they are getting very good traffic with high PR.(one thing more in economics we say that copying also make a man perfect (E.g Q mobile Pakistan). Technology transfer.

    1. Hi Mohammad, first of all even if google doesn’t catch you as you said, it’s unithical to just copy an article and use a spinner to make it somehow unique. Additionally a spin will lack in quality and google doesn’t like low quality plus readers will not like it and you will not establish a loyal readership by just copying others people work…

  12. This is nice stuff to spend your valuable time in SEO for your site/blog and this is going more important after regular update of Google panda and Google penguin.

  13. nice article but i have a question is there any limit to keywords like how much are we allowed to allocate to a post in order to not get spammy, does anyone know the exact number…

    1. Hi Jawad, there is no limit in the keywords you can use in your article (unless you are meaning keyword density) what you should mostly care about is the quality of your posts and your readers. Naturally a post written for a subject will have many variations of your main keyword so it this will be enough for SEO plus if you use H2 , H3 etc tags with your keywords it will be an extra boost…

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