5 Practices to Absolutely Avoid to Prevent Penalizing Your Organic SEO on Google and Beyond

Even though you’ve implemented search engine optimization (SEO) strategies on your website, are you still not seeing the expected results on search engines like Google, Bing, or others?

During the design and development of your website, it’s possible that certain harmful practices negatively impacted your search rankings. In this article*, discover the practices you should avoid—those penalized by Google—as well as the ones you should adopt starting today!

1. Avoid Automatically Generated or Repurposed Content

Practice to avoid:
Combining text from sources like Wikipedia or your professional association may seem efficient, but in Google’s eyes, this adds no value for users—since they can easily find the same content elsewhere. It can also create duplicate content, meaning identical text appears across multiple websites.

Best practice:
Create original content that informs and engages your target audience. When producing content, prioritize your users before thinking about search engine rankings (such as keyword stuffing). This will naturally increase the value of your content in the eyes of your audience.

2. Don’t Rely Solely on Affiliate Content

Practice to avoid:
Avoid building most of your website content using text from affiliates or suppliers. For example, if you distribute cleaning products and only display technical specifications provided by suppliers, users can easily find that same information on your partners’ websites. As a result, your content offers no added value.

Best practice:
Use this type of content sparingly. Add value by including customer reviews, tips, expert advice, or unique insights.

3. Don’t Create Link Schemes

Practice to avoid:
Avoid purchasing multiple domain names just to redirect them to a main URL in order to improve indexing. This is considered a deceptive practice by Google and is often penalized. Similarly, simply buying keyword-rich domain names is no longer enough to rank well.

Best practice:
Focus on creating high-quality, valuable content that people want to share. The more useful your content is, the more likely it will be referenced on other websites.

4. Don’t Hide Text or Links on Your Web Pages

Practice to avoid:
Do not hide text using white font on a white background, placing it behind images, setting font size to zero, or positioning it outside the visible screen area. Likewise, avoid hiding links within a single character just to insert keywords. Google has advanced tools to detect these manipulative tactics—and will penalize your site accordingly.

Best practice:
Ensure that all your content is visible to users. Everything on your website should be accessible, except for specific elements like image alt text (ALT**).

5. Avoid Keyword Stuffing on Your Web Pages

Practice to avoid (1):
Do not create blocks of text filled with lists of keywords you want to rank for—such as long lists of cities or regions. For example, if someone is searching for your services in Drummondville, is it relevant for them to see that you also serve Toronto? No.
Also, avoid repeating keywords unnaturally, such as:
“Our concrete company specializes in concrete installation. Concrete installation, performed by our concrete installation company, is handled by our concrete installation experts.”

Best practice:
Create content that includes one to three primary keywords per page. Diversify your content to avoid duplication issues mentioned earlier in this article.

Conclusion

In short, remember: the web is content—and content is the web!

Focus on creating original, rich, relevant, and useful content for your audience to maximize your online visibility. Not sure where to start? Looking for a specialized web writer or content strategist? Think your website has been penalized by Google due to one of these practices?

Contact us today! Together, we’ll identify the actions needed to help you achieve strong online visibility—done the right way.

Psst! Check out our article on 5 tips to improve your Google ranking and visibility on other search engines for more ideas!

* This article was largely inspired by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines from the Webmaster Tools Help Center.

** ALT text appears when an image fails to load or when hovering over it. Its purpose is to accurately describe images to improve your website’s accessibility.