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Bad practice in search engine optimisation (SEO) and online marketing in general, is something that I come across from time to time and when I do, I’m still surprised that there are people out there using these techniques to gain rankings for website owners, most of whom are unfortunately none the wiser about these practices.
At Savvy Marketers, not only do we want to educate you about online marketing that works, but also what techniques can damage your rankings (even your reputation), so that when you’re looking to choose a provider, you don’t get ripped off.
In terms of SEO, these are some of the common bad practices that I come across:
Hidden text – this is when text on the page is the same colour as the background colour, so that it isn’t seen by visitors to the website. However, search engines can see it. It’s bad practice and won’t do anything for your rankings.
Keyword stuffing – stuffing keywords into the meta tags, and ‘alt’ (image) tags, sometime greyed out keywords at the bottom of the websites’ pages.
‘CSS’ spam – this is basically spam in the code of the web pages, a bit like hidden text but rather than the text being the same colour as the background of the page, it’s hidden in the code.
Redirects – using ‘meta refreshes’ to redirect one (spammy) page to another.
What can happen if these techniques are used? Rankings may be depressed and at worst, your website could be banned from the search engines and it’s not easy to get it re-listed. Search engines have strict guidelines as to quality of web pages and you can read Google’s webmaster guidelines here.
It’s worth reading these guidelines so that you don’t get stung, and if you’re really not sure, just ask either myself or Louise!
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
A question – one of my clients has a website designed by a graphic designer with a dislike of headings. So the developer has created an H1 class ‘hidden’, in order to create H1 headings that don’t actually display, for SEO purposes. Is this ‘CSS spam’ and will they get penalised for it?
I don’t really see the point of doing that and yes, it is showing one thing to the search engines and something else to site visitors, so would go against guidelines. I’m not sure how much the site would get penalised if it’s the only thing that goes against guidelines, so they may be OK, but would recommend that the title shows properly on the page.