What is the list of SEO services that can hurt your site SEO potential?

The modern market for SEO is overcrowded with different optimization service providers. Some companies put up a website and advertise SEO services without actually knowing what they are doing. Others do not follow Google Webmaster Guidelines providing SEO services for their clients. And finally, you may face companies that still use old optimization approaches that are not effective anymore. All these services can negatively affect your site SEO and cause search engine penalties. 

When it comes to SEO, no one is safe from fraudulent optimization companies and money loses. However, we can learn which optimization services can get our web sources penalized. This information will help us to prevent money and time loses. Moreover, if you have already signed a contract with an optimization services provider, you may check whether their actions are about to get you penalized or you can sleep easy. 

If you are lucky and your site has never been hit with search engine penalties, then I will try to explain to you how it looks like. There are two basic types of Google penalties - manual penalties (it is when you receive notification about the violation via Webmaster Tool), and automated (those caused by algorithm changes). Automated changes are for example Panda and Penguin updates. They have been designed to cut down on fraudulent webmaster activities like automated link building, link farming, private blog networks, spam, and so on. 

To identify that there is a subject to a penalty, you need to keep a close eye on your organic search traffic and rankings to track any sudden rises and drops in performance. You should conduct regular site auditing and researchers as well as link cleanups. It will help you to prevent yourself from Google functions. If your site is hit with Google penalties, it means that the next several years you will spend repair reputational damage. It means that you need to start everything from scratch plus investing additional money to address the effects of search engine penalties. 

As you plan your optimization strategy for the nearest future, there are several things to watch out for. If you observe any of these things on your site, it means that you are on your way to a Google penalty. 

The list of dumb SEO services that can cause search engine penalties

Linking to your homepage

At first sight, there is nothing suspicious when you put links to your homepage. It is the basics of any link building strategy. However, some webmasters do it in a wrong way. To show their clients effectiveness of their optimization campaign, they acquire a lot of spammy backlinks to the home page. In such a way this page receives a lot of irrelevant and spammy traffic that raises red flags for search engines. 

There is also can be another problem when SEO consultant implements old-fashioned optimization techniques, building as many backlinks as possible to website main page. This approach was popular in 2005 and has nothing in common with modern search engine optimization. Google does not rank websites; it ranks pages. That is why it makes sense to build links to quality content within your site, avoiding concentration on a homepage. 

If you’ve noticed that your SEO provider links your homepage to an exact match keyword, it may be a sign of wrong optimization activity. For example, if you see an exact match anchor text and a homepage link combined, it is a road leading to search engine penalties. 

The only way how you can link to your homepage is to create branded backlinks. They look natural when, for example, somebody is writing an article about your company or services and links to your homepage.

If your site looks like landing page and does not contain any pages except the leading one, you need to reconsider your marketing plan. For example, you can start a blog or add pages with services. It will help you to generate organic and targeted traffic that may convert into sales. 

Link farming

Link farming is another fraudulent link building technique that does not coincide with Google Webmaster Guidelines. A link farm is a series of web sources set up by an SEO provider for the purpose of creating backlinks to specific sites. These sites have no value for readers and search engines. They are specifically designed to manipulate search results. Search engines can easily detect such link farms and penalize all domains connected with them. 

A similar problem is with the link wheels. It is when a marketer links to a money article from others. Some SEO consultants can use link wheels without incorporating link farms. This kind of link building can even occur naturally if the links are integrated into high-quality content. That is why you should not draw hasty conclusions. When an optimization agency can acquire backlinks for you, ask if they own the property where the link originates. If so, it is mostly a link farm. 

Acquiring links from penalized web sources

Some webmasters build links from penalized web sources as it is easy to do and does not require any additional spendings. It does not make sense to create links to penalized websites as it can raise search engine suspicious toward your own site. These sites are not trusted by Google so you won’t get any favor from such links. Your priority should be to create links on authoritative and relevant web sources that have a good reputation and high rank. 

So, you should ask your SEO services provider how it determines which sites to acquire a link from. If you have never heard about such sites and they have nothing in common with your business, it may be a bad sign for you. Moreover, you can use penalty checkers to understand whether a specific web source has an ideal reputation or not. 

To know everything about your link profile, I advise you to get a full list of links that have been acquired and conduct research for each.