In one of our recent blogs we gave you our Top Tips For SEO and how keywords play such a vital role. This time however we’re going to tell you what NOT to do. Making sure your website doesn’t have any of these SEO pitfalls is just as important as a well thought out keyword strategy.

 

Duplicating Content

Duplicated content is that which is shared between different websites or various pages of the same website. Although this method is effective in generating greater traffic for your keywords (as it appears multiple times across pages), it doesn’t add any value to your site. Search engines reward sites with original, bespoke content so don’t go copy and pasting from another source.

 

Thin Content

Content on your site that has little to no value to the user is known as Thin Content. This can be in the form of copied content that features on multiple other sites, auto generated content or affiliate content that doesn’t provide any additional information. Google describes thin content as “low-quality or shallow pages on your site.” If your site has too many of these features, then search engines will hit you with a penalty and your SEO will take a serious hit.

 

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Keyword Stuffing

Search engines are huge fans of quality over quantity. As a result, they penalise sites that overuse keywords in an attempt to improve a page’s ranking. Especially if the content doesn’t flow naturally. For example, it you’re page is selling umbrellas and your content read “Our umbrellas are the best umbrellas around. We guarantee our umbrellas are the best in the market and have features like no other umbrellas!” Not only is this rather annoying to read but it is considered a prohibited SEO technique. Keywords must be used wisely and should be incorporated naturally within the page’s content.

 

Auto-generated Content

Basically any content that’s created by programs to manipulate search engine results in favour of a website but isn’t providing any useful information to users. Auto-generated content is neither original, useful or relevant (the main attributes that search engines look for) and as a result will mean your pages get penalised.

Avoid these SEO pitfalls to ensure your sites aren’t penalised by the major search engines. They might seem like easy, quick fixes but they’ll do more damage than good in the long run.

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