Learn About The SEO Risks That You Should Avoid And Those You Can Take Part II
SEO Risks That Should Be Avoided
It is worth taking certain SEO risks; however, there are other types of risk that you should not take since they can damage your bottom line and your business. Let’s review the risks that should be avoided.
1. Doorway Pages
It is easy to make doorway pages that are used for certain keyword phrases or keywords. Usually, SEO experts do not use doorway pages since Google doesn’t like them and will often penalize a website that has doorway pages on them. For that reason, you should avoid using any doorway pages on your website.
The only time a doorway page is not penalized by Google is when it provides valuable, unique, and clear content or information for its visitors. This kind of doorway is similar to other content on your website and viewed that way by Google.
Since Google has a negative opinion of doorway pages, you should avoid using them on your site.
2. Neutral Backlinks
Getting high-quality backlinks for your website is something you want, but poor-quality backlinks are something that you want to avoid as much as possible. However, what about having neutral backlinks? These are links that don’t hurt or help your site’s page rankings. Neutral backlinks don’t provide your website with a boost; however, Google is not penalizing your website for having neutral backlinks any longer.
With Google’s latest Penguin update, it was determined by the search engine that websites frequently cannot control which sites link to their website. That is beneficial for website owners since they are no longer being punished for backlinks since they don’t necessarily have control over the links pointing back to their site.
The only way you can tell if there are bad backlinks pointing to your website is if they are spammy and low-quality. Google might take action against those backlinks and manually remove them off of your website.
If no action is taken by Google, then you can assume those backlinks on your website are safe, even when they are not those high-quality backlinks that increase your page rankings in the search results.
Although certain backlinks can be disallowed, you need to be careful. If neutral backlinks are disallowed on your site, you might risk blocking sites that can help with improving your page ranks.
3. Removing Entire Pages From Your Website Or Deleting or Condensing Content From Your site
You might want to remove or delete entire pages from your website about a discontinued product or service. However, once you delete the page, the keywords that were helping your rank your website are not there any longer. The page URL, including the page-specific keyword phrases and keywords, disappear.
Instead of your page rankings taking a hit, you might want to keep these web pages, even if they are for discontinued products or services. Place a message on the page to inform your visitors that there is a similar service or product that is available and supply a redirect link for it.
If you are going to be merging or condensing several pages into one page, make sure to include 301 redirects so that the traffic and links continue.
4. Avoid Using Exact Match Keywords Too Much In Your Anchor Text.
Maybe you think it is a good idea to include your targeted keywords in your anchor text for your site. You are wanting your website to rank for those targeted keyword phrases or keywords.
In the past, this was a very popular practice and SEO experts were following this logic. Unfortunately, technique started to be extensively used by black hat SEO professionals where exact matching keywords were used heavily for their websites. These links were also not coming from high-quality sites.
Since then Google has cracked down on the practice of using exact match keywords in anchor text. On pages and sites where this technique is used, they will be penalized and hurt their page rankings. Therefore, this technique should be avoided. Instead, search for natural ways of creating a diverse backlink portfolio and high-quality websites to link to your site.
5. Avoid Making Numerous Small Changes To Your Website
In general, updating the content on your website is a good idea and Google likes fresh and updated content. However, when you are constantly changing the appearance or content on your website, it can have a negative impact on your page rankings and visitors to your website may be uncomfortable with the constant changes.
Making changes too frequently or making lots of them at the same time may flag your website as being suspicious. Quite often Google penalizes websites that make frequent changes or many changes at once. Therefore, it is better to limit how many changes are made to your website.
Regular site visitors also will notice changes you make to your website, particularly if those changes are made for improving page rankings instead of providing your visitors with more high-quality content. Those changes can also make it hard to navigate your website and make visitors feel suspicious of your site.
Balancing Risk and Reward
Expert SEO needs to be performed to ensure the success of your business. However, there are numerous risky practices that might damage your page rankings. There are also certain risks that may help to improve your page rankings. You need t to learn which SEO risks should be avoided and which ones can be taken.
Although SEO does have certain risks that are associated with, the riskiest thing that you can possibly do is to not perform search engine optimization.
