To enforce order in the Google SERPs, Google has erected several rules in order to get the most relevant results possible. Each rule makes it possible to find the best (legal) way to get as close as possible to the truth which will propel us to 1st position by understanding the limits not to be exceeded, by crossing the dark side of SEO , what are called techniques black-hat(unlike White Hat techniques, which are best practices to use). By using these bad practices, what are the risks? From a simple warning to the total eviction of your website from the SERPs, including a sudden drop in positioning, here is a review of the things not to do if you want to quickly increase your natural referencing.
Black Hat SEO techniques punishable according to Google
A Black Hat (the person who will seek to circumvent the SEO rules) has the sole objective of boosting the positioning of his website in the SERPs by any means, whether legitimate or not. If Google invents these rules, it is precisely so that everyone can play on an equal footing, whether you are a new website or the site established for 20 years. Thus, if you respect the rules to perfection, you will have a good chance of appearing in a reasonable time in the search results of the keywords you have targeted and of staying there, but if you use the workarounds As a rule, you’ll have a chance of appearing faster or more efficiently at the top…until you get caught by the vigilante Google.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate Content, or simply Duplicate Content, is what is commonly called plagiarism. When you copy the content of another website to appropriate it on your site, you do not create any added value for the user, so Google will simply take note of your page, make the link with an identical page (or almost) and not to reference you on this content. By offering “external” duplicate content (which does not come from your site), Google will simply apply a filter that will avoid referencing duplicates. The majority of Duplicate Content problems often come from the Title or Meta-Description tag which are often identical, in this case, Google will not necessarily seek to index the same result twice.
The other possibility of Duplicate Content is “internal” duplicate content (which comes from your site), because it is also not allowed to index and reference two perfectly identical pages or with similar ideas. A page on your website must be unique and offer added value that cannot be found anywhere else. If you write the same thing twice in two different places on your site, Google will lose the intensity of the unique information and dilute the strength of your message in the SERPs to the point of even making you disappear from searches and not making you appear only once… too bad if your pages were both interesting.
Your goal, if you are the author of Duplicate Content, will be to create original content that offers something more personal than a simple copy and paste, with your added value to the content. Other ways are good for indicating to robots that you have almost identical content, especially if you have an online store with the same product in several different copies, either by playing with the options of your product, or by adding canonical tags that will allow Google not to have to choose itself which product deemed identical will be the one it will present in the SERPs. Finally, do not hesitate to merge your content if this is deemed relevant and to create 301 redirects in order to index a single URL and more extensive content.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword Stuffing, or simply “keyword stuffing” is a practice punished by Google. As its name suggests, it consists of submitting the same keyword several times in a text, to the point of putting too many for it to seem natural (because in natural referencing, there is … natural!). This method was widely used in the 90s when the algorithm used was simplistic, because it consisted of counting the number of times a keyword appeared on the page to judge its relevance. Thus, writing the term “custom embroidered scarf” 250 times in its web content was enough to rank higher than another site that only used it 100 times to rank higher. Today, this practice is considered harmful for your website because it is considered spam. Besides being ineffective,
If your goal is to accentuate your keyword, prefer hot areas of your page such as the Title tag or the H1 tag (and H2 to decline this keyword with some long-tail synonyms) without over-optimizing all that. It is on these tags that Google will seek to draw the main juice and the theme of your page, so it is best to focus only on a very ambiguous Title tag “Your embroidered and personalized scarf” and a similar H1 to make it clear to Google that it is this information that it must interpret as a keyword rather than integrating this famous term 200 times in the body of the text.
Content Spinning
Content Spinning, which is similar to Duplicate Content, is a strategy for creating content based on almost identical and automatically generated text with some variations. So, the possibility of creating pages on your site is almost unlimited as long as you have synonyms or names to suggest. This method is obviously heavily sanctioned by Google, which does not consider it relevant to write the same page of a site too many times by simply changing a few expressions automatically.
For example, a site like Mercatoland, specialist in football transfers, writes articles, all identical to the channel, only changing the name and surname of the player on the page. If the possibilities here are endless, Google will understand that the pages are all identical and were created by software and have no intellectual basis. Judge for yourself, the site only changes some information but 98% of the text remains identical in the eyes of the user, with the sole aim of positioning as many pages as possible in the SERPs according to the queries typed.
Aggressive Netlinking
Netlinking, or “exchanging links” is a practice that is already not recommended by Google. It consists of being quoted by other sites to improve its notoriety and thus show Google that our site is trustworthy. When this strategy is no longer considered natural and your site begins to enjoy many new unnatural backlinks with the sole purpose of increasing your TrustFlow and your PageRank, you are subject to SEO penalties from Google.
To avoid this, it is necessary that your SEO strategy is not interpreted by Google as an intention to buy many links in exchange for money. The risk here is losing money and making the backlinks you purchased ineffective. Favor the natural exchanges of links between sites (if possible, between several sites rather than only A <-> B) or write articles that will make other colleagues in the business want to quote you in their pages!
To go further on SEO penalties and sanctions
If I don’t do Duplicate Content on purpose, is it serious?
We will talk about duplicate content when two identical or almost identical contents are found on two different pages of your site. Google will not heavily penalize your site, but simply de-index the least popular page or the one with the least relevant information in its first Google results in order to avoid duplicates in the SERP of a searched keyword. So don’t panic, it’s quite possible to write something twice on your site, but it’s not recommended, because one page of your site = one idea/one keyword to target!
My site lost all its traffic, I had an SEO penalty?
Yes or no ! Do not confuse penalty and loss of positions on Google! A loss of position is quite possible if other sites write more relevant things than you on the same subjects as you, or if your site has a technical problem (poorly carried out maintenance, inaccessible pages, migrations, poor acceptance of Cookies…) which can lead to sudden drops in traffic for your audience. Your site must also meet other criteria in mind to stay in its current positions, such as the freshness of the site or to stay in the nails of Google algorithm updates.
On the other hand, a penalty can also cause a loss of positions in Google, but you will (almost) always be notified by Google of the penalty imposed following non-compliance with the rules.
How do I know if I am under SEO sanctions from Google?
To verify that your website has indeed been sanctioned by Google, refer to your site’s Google Search Console in the “Security and manual actions” tab, which may indicate to you via a message from Google that your site has been sanctioned with an SEO penalty. A manual sanction has therefore been applied to your site, which means that one or more prohibited practices have been detected by a human. It is possible that sometimes your Search Console does not show you anything because you are algorithmically penalized by a Google, Panda or Pinguin filter.
To correct the SEO penalties you are guilty of, SEO for Pest Control Companies is necessary to audit the past and present of the website in order to get out of the SEO penalty and allow Google to reintegrate you into the search results without the illegal techniques you were using. Unfortunately, this is not instantaneous.
