I imagine you too have been spending a lot of time at your home, practicing social distancing, avoiding contact with people as recommended by health experts, and probably doing some work on your website SEO, but I have to ask did you ever consider the bad SEO?
Being away from other people, many of us use modern technology to stay in touch with our loved ones, while the rest of the time is spent on many tasks that you always leave “for tomorrow”, and now one of these tasks is checking your online SEO.
Is bad SEO possible?
Yes, bad SEO is possible and it happens to both beginners and experienced people in the SEO industry.
In a way, we can say that bad SEO is the negative product of over-optimizing your current SEO plan with a few mistakes that can happen to any SEO practitioner, and they are often caused by misinformation.
The thing is, search engine optimization is evolving, and some SEO decisions that were good in the past have become obsolete, redundant or their effect is now negative, so they need to be alleviated.
A piece of advice about bad SEO from Google
When talking about search engines, many of us would think first of Google, so we will start with a few advice from them about bad SEO and what to remove from your website.
One of the most common bad SEOs that some websites do is marquee tag because at a certain time it was recommended by John Mueller as an awesome feature.
However, the horizontal text scroll is not a perfect fit for every website, and especially now when sites have to be responsive and cater to mobile users too.
Mobile users are presented with “endless” websites in a “single column” where they scroll the website vertically instead of viewing a static page, making the marquee tag obsolete as it would ruin the user experience.
Another deprecated HTML element that “drives the (Google) webspam team crazy” is “<blink> Tag” which is originally used to make flashing text. It too is obsolete and needs to be removed.
I can’t imagine what a combination of both the marquee tag and blink tag would look like on a slick modern website.
Bad SEO practices in 2020
We can all agree that search engines have come a long way and now their bots have smart algorithms that can discern any trickstery you are trying to use to get ahead with your site.
Still, some websites build content that is clearly done for bots instead of humans, by spamming keywords, content length, and hundreds of links to this aim.
This kind of content building in 2020 is obviously obsolete and counterproductive in today’s SEO environment because of one thing.
What it takes to get your site search ranking up (and satisfy the bots) is the same as what would satisfy your visitors – a responsive website that loads quickly with both desktop and mobile, and provides useful and original content.
This is actually a (very) good thing, because if your visitors are satisfied with your website you will be ranking well, and they will interact with it (engage with content, order services or products).
Come to think of it, if they do not interact with your website, then what good is it to be ranked well in the first place?
Conclusion
What you have to understand as a website owner, is that your website content is online and it can have a positive as well as a negative impact on your business.
Search engine optimization has changed over the years, drastically changing for the better of both website owners and internet users, but you have to keep learning and applying this knowledge.