SEO Blog

I don’t particularly enjoy talking about the darker side of SEO, it doesn’t exactly do much to help improve the image of the industry any. However, the biggest problem is that there are still so many people who falsely use the SEO as their excuse to print money.

They don’t take the time to even understand the industry, the practices involved or even bothering about delivering on promises. Online though, promises are easily broken.

Anyway, if you have ever faced the hardest of hard sells from one of these practitioners, you’ll probably know all the warning signs anyway. Just in case you don’t, here are a few things to watch out for:
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You’re probably tired about reading how evil paid links are by now. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they continue to work; however, criticisms against them rarely come with any explicit examples of the negative impact they can have.

Well, how about this one? Econsultancy yesterday highlighted the case of gourmetgiftbaskets.com, who offer exactly what their name suggests [see: The $4m Google penalty]. They were making huge profits and sitting comfortably in the top couple of places on Google for all of their primary terms. Unfortunately though one day all the rankings disappeared. No word of warning, no apparent reason why, the site just wasn’t visible any more.

The culprit? Paid links of course.
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Generally speaking blackhat techniques will be picked up by the search engines and the perpetrators punished. However, this isn’t always the case. There are still occasions where you can get a huge benefit from bending the search engines rules, for as long as you remain undetected.

Let’s take link buying as a primary example. Whilst many would class this as more of a grey area, it is against Google’s usage policy and therefore it certainly couldn’t be construed as ethical. Link buying is still hugely popular though; this is in no small part due to the fact that it is often difficult to trace whether a link is natural or not.
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Whether you’ve spent weeks or years developing your website, it is a valuable part of your identity and your business. Therefore you want to be sure that you are in safe hands, particularly when it comes to outsourcing your SEO.

There are so many horror stories and online scaremongers to sow seeds of doubt in your mind. This isn’t an entirely bad thing. Vigilance is a useful ally to have. SEO does have its fair share of sharks, so you have to be sure that you aren’t going to be their next victim.

So what should you be asking to avoid falling prey to these circling predators?
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Duplicate pages and, in particular, duplicate content is a major sticking point when it comes to effective SEO.  Whether you have a number of URLs for the same page, or have decided to reuse a bit of copy from elsewhere, you are running the risk of facing a penalty from Google.

You might not have been aware that an offence had occurred, or even that you weren’t strictly supposed to duplicate your content; however, in the world of SEO, ignorance isn’t necessarily bliss. It is unlikely that you will receive a severe punishment from the search engines, unless the offence is flagrant and in breach of their codes, but it could undermine your other site strengthening efforts.
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