Website Redesign SEO | Scams that Ruin Your Website

Worried about website redesign SEO scams that ruin your online marketing efforts? Get-rich-quick schemes are nothing new. Market trends, like search engine optimization, always attract techniques that seek to “cheat the system.” And while it can work for a season, cheating always brings consequences once it’s discovered. Before you start looking for SEO tools for your website redesign, educate yourself with the top SEO scams that eventually kill website rankings.

1. Keyword Stuffing

Did you know that search engines like Google once based their search results page on EXACT matches between search words and phrases (called “keywords”) and words written on a website (called “content”)?

The problem with this is that businesses (or their webmasters) would spend MORE time injecting their web content with keywords RATHER than focusing on creating helpful content. This deceptive way of producing content is now known as “keyword stuffing.” Google has since refined its capabilities and seeks to “punish” keyword stuffing as a negative practice that ruins user experience.

Matt Cutts, former head of the web spam team at Google, warned webmasters about the dangers of SEO keyword stuffing and over optimization. He said the Google team is working to make Google smarter, more relevant, and is “looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect.”

Techniques that abuse the purpose of search engines in this way have been labeled with the term “blackhat.” According to Google, blackhat SEO methods will damage your website redesign and reputation, which will also result in lower rankings on search engines.

2. Bad Backlinking

As Cutts mentioned in the above quotation, the second SEO scam you should be aware of includes the accumulation of massive amounts of backlinks. Backlinks simply refer to any hyperlink on another website that links back to your website.

While keywords can help to prove what a webpage is about, backlinks can prove that others believe that webpage is a great resource. For example, in this article we linked to Google’s support page on search engine optimization (see above link). We aren’t working to boost Google’s page ranking on search engines (which would be silly), we just know it holds reliable and relevant information that supports our statement. That’s an example of a high-quality backlink for Google.

Bad backlinks, also called “low-quality” or even “spammy” backlinks, refer to links from websites designed with the sole purpose to boost search engine rankings. These deceptive backlinks appear in a number of ways:

• Backlinks from other countries that aren’t associated with the website’s products or services
• Backlinks in comments sections (Just like email spam, website comment sections might receive low-quality comments written just to include a backlink)

Google’s algorithm updates have and continue to work to punish websites that practice blackhat techniques like these. Website developers need to stay ahead of Google algorithms to be aware of what could get their company’s website slammed off search results pages.

If you’re redesigning a website, don’t get ruined by these SEO scams. Check out our guide on how to avoid SEO mistakes as you design your new website.