Search Engine Spam Penalties That Every Marketer Needs To Know

If you are entering the realm of search engine optimisation Sydney in Australia, you are likely to encounter some toxins or black hat tactics. These are tricks or shortcuts that may have been enough to guarantee a high ranking when the search engines’ methods were less sophisticated. They might also work now, at least until when you are caught. You should stay away from these tactics as they will result in a ban or penalty.

Cloaking

This involves showing Google crawlers something different than what you show to users. Cloaking can be used to trick a user into visiting harmful or irrelevant pages. Cloaking is not something that happens by accident. It is a deliberate attempt by marketers to manipulate search results. You should expect a heavy penalty if you are caught doing it.

Stuffing

This is another shortcut in search engine optimisation that novice marketers in Australia use. You might assume that the more times you use keywords on a page, the more relevant Google will consider the page to be. Inserting keywords in your content more often than is useful or natural to users is known as keyword stuffing. It is one of the oldest and most overused spam tactics out there. It can get your site penalised.

Piracy

Piracy is trying to use someone else’s intellectual property and using it as your own. This could be a song, article, photo, graphic, video and more. This behaviour is illegal and it is bad for SEO. Users want to read the original source of content and it is the work of search engines to provide it to them.

Schemes

Using backlinks is an essential aspect of search engine optimisation Sydney in Australia. But the rules change when you buy backlinks. Paying for links with an intention of passing link equity violates Google and Bing’s guidelines. Doing so can have consequences for your visibility.