Is there such thing as bad SEO information?

All of you have probably faced the tons of content about search engine optimization on the Internet. If you have at least a little experience in this sphere, you may distinguish between quality SEO tips and advice (as MOZ, Semalt or Search Engine Journal provide) and useless and even sometimes wrong information about optimization procedures provided by non-professionals. However, if you are a newcomer in a digital marketing sphere, some quality articles might be a little confusing to you and even destroy your Google rankings. In this short guide, I will give you some notions what entirely wrong SEO tips you need to avoid to make your online business prosperous.

Definition of bad SEO information

If you are wondering what bad SEO content is, I advise you to read this paragraph carefully. Bad SEO content is ALL about outdated, useless and outside the boundaries of search engine standards information. It is easy to distinguish bad SEO content as it usually starts with words “how I improve my website SEO in a day...”. Often, such articles contain a certain promotional subtext. Black-hat SEO specialists generate such kind of unbelievable stories to promote their services. I advise you do not read this kind of articles as they do not carry any valuable information. Moreover, you are risking to devastate your website rankings by following black-hat SEO tips. So let us discuss what optimization advice we need to avoid not to hurt our site reputation.

• Keyword stuffing

One of the most widely used outdated SEO advice is keyword stuffing. As Google become smarter every day, this kind of optimization run its course. Nowadays, you need to create your content for website visitors, not for search bots. Moreover, Google bots can also evaluate your content quality and count the number of keywords. If you have more than five keywords per page, you are risking to get Google penalties. Moreover, a stuffed content is not readable and cannot be useful for users as it was created only for advertising purposes. Instead of stuffing your content with keywords, you should select the most relevant and traffic-volume key phrases and insert them into your titles, descriptions, opening paragraphs, ALTs and only several times in the text.

• Duplicate content

Some so-called SEO specialists write that there is no threat in duplicate content. However, it is a wrong judgment. By publishing duplicate content, you manipulate search engines tempting them to see things the way you wish instead of how they actually are. So, non-original content may cause a drop in your website rankings. There is a relatively small percent that you can receive Google penalties for duplicate content. However, you won’t exactly improve your site online presence by generating copy-pasted content as Google already has the same content in its index. If you need to have some duplicate content on your site due to same business needs, you should “no index, and no follow” this content to avoid any negative results.