Here’s a best of bad SEO marketing techniques that will send sites nose diving in the rankings. Methods of search engine optimization vary by firm but all agree these 5 optimization mistakes will do more harm than good. Everything from duplicate content, keyword stuffing, cloaking, bad links and slow loading websites are ranking killers when focusing on driving new traffic to the site.

SEO Marketing Techniques to Avoid

Novice search engine optimization marketeers take note to these guaranteed ways to destroy website rankings in no time.

Duplicate Website Content 

This is a common mistake made by beginner web designers, content writers and optimizer. Basically one page of the website ranks really well for a couple keyword phrases and the designer will copy and paste that same content to multiple pages of the site. Another duplicate content issue is when a designer takes content from another website that was previously published. Google stores every website it finds on the internet in their database. When they check that database against a newly published page and the same words come up in the same order rankings will suffer. This is due to the fact that Google sees the site as stealing its content from an earlier publication online.

Keyword Phrase Stuffing

Another oldie-but-goodie method of trying to boost rankings is by repeating certain keyword phrases over and over on a page. This is a an old cheat that relies on hoping that when Google indexes a new webpage they’ll see that phrase mentioned so many times that it will be super relevant and go to the top of the search results. Unfortunately this is not the case and usually the exact opposite will happen. An example if we were to create a page and say Ace Mod is the best SEO company in Long Beach and mention that phrase 20x on a page with 300 words on it is a good example of keyword stuffing.

Hidden Text, Links and Cloaking

Possibly the very first deceptive way to boost your rankings was by hiding text on a web page. Using the same example as above what if we wrote “Ace Mod SEO Consulting in Long Beach” a hundred times in white, on a white background. In the old days the Google spiders would see that phrase mentioned so many times that they would want to put it right in the top results. That same page when looked at by a visitor is just a white background. But that was many years ago and time moves on and so does Google’s ability to decipher exactly what a webpage is relevant for.

Bad SEO Link Strategies

SEO marketing techniques that use paid back links are another way to help a website sink like a weight in the search results. Another SEO disaster is having lots and lots of back links to your website coming from low-quality, spam and questionable pages. The only way to throw your website a lifeline at this point is to disavow the back links via Google webmaster tools. Getting Google to disavow back links is not a task for the novice web designer. For this you will need to hire a SEO specialists or hire a web designer who can handle the task.

Slow Loading Websites

A slow loading website is not so much bad SEO marketing techniques but will kill rankings just as quick as some of the above bad SEO examples. When clicking on a link to a website that’s slow loading causing a longer than normal waiting time, most folks will hit the back button. When this happens the user will choose another website to visit from the search results. Google sees this as a bad user experience for someone trying to visit the site from their search results page. At this point Google drops a site in the rankings favoring another website just as relevant but loads faster.