7 Bad SEO Practices & How to Avoid Them

SEO can improve your website’s rankings in search engines like Google. Earning you more traffic, more clicks, and more conversions.

But bad SEO can hurt your search engine rankings and visibility. Losing you time and money.

Luckily, bad SEO is within your control.

To stop it from damaging your website’s rankings and reputation, learn about these seven common bad SEO practices. And how you can fix or avoid them.

But first, let’s define bad SEO and its consequences.

What Is Bad SEO?

Bad SEO is any practice that hurts your rankings, provides a poor user experience (UX), or goes against Google’s guidelines. These are often outdated SEO practices.

But bad SEO can also be accidental. Like your site having lots of duplicate content you didn’t know about.

Or, intentional. Like trying to exploit a search engine algorithm through unethical techniques.

What Are Unethical SEO Techniques?

Unethical SEO techniques are practices used to improve your website’s rankings that violate search engine guidelines. These practices are used to manipulate a search engine’s algorithm.

Alternatively, ethical SEO techniques are practices used to improve your website’s rankings that follow search engine guidelines.

Trying to exploit loopholes in a search algorithm will likely catch up with you. As search engines evolve, unethical SEO is becoming easier to spot. And the penalties for getting caught often aren’t worth the risk.

What Is a Google Penalty?

A Google penalty (also known as a manual...