Are you a Webspammer?

SEO practices are very different today than how they were even just a few years ago. The number one key to ranking well in search engines today is to create unique quality content. First post it on your website or blog and then share it only on the social media sites which matter to your business or make sense for your industry. There are two different strategies when it comes to social media. Either bring visitors from your website to your social profile pages or bring fans back to your website from your social profile pages. The most important factors to either strategy are interaction and engagement. Interaction meaning in the moment and engagement being over time. Just posting for the sake of posting won’t do you any good either. You need to ask questions and allow your fans to get involved, and then be sure to reply to them when they leave comments.

Why all of this talk about social media? It’s because the days where you stuff pages full of keywords or create multiple landing pages with the goal of spamming search engines are over. Google’s main goal is to show the best results possible to those using their search engine. They don’t want to show results of pages that have spammed their way to the top. If you made your way to the first page and did so in such a way that Google would consider as being spammy, sooner or later you could find your indexed pages removed from search results altogether. Note that creating landing pages for targeted AdWords campaigns is okay… just set them to no index, no follow and you won’t be penalized.

How do you know what could be considered as “spamming a search engine?” Well it’s actually quite simple. Basically, if you duplicated pages or created multiple sub domains and slightly tweaked the content to fit your targeted keywords, then changed the canonical link tags to prevent them from being flagged as duplicate content, that’s considered spamming. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do all you can to keep your code clean and follow best practices… it just means that trying too hard could lead to trouble. The same goes for link building. If you had to go out on your own to try and build backlinks instead of having people genuinely link to your unique and interesting content, it could be another sign that you’re trying too hard.

What should you do to make sure you aren’t flagged as a webspammer? Be genuine. Create your content with the intent of sharing it with your fans. Make it interesting. Don’t write articles for search bots by stuffing them with keywords. That can make your content feel very unnatural when reading it. Write for your fans. Doing so can create fans who will interact with your content, which could then lead to long term engagement. We didn’t write this blog post with the intent of adding particular keywords to our blog… we wrote it because we often have clients who ask us about SEO. Having this blog post will help us explain our take on today’s best SEO practices, and in return we may also be rewarded by having unique content which we wrote for others to read and share. The next step is for us to share it on social media in hopes of our fans liking what they read, asking questions, and then resharing it. It may even bring some people back to our website and create new fans!

If you would like for us to analyze your current website and make sure you’re not at risk, call us at 888.420.5115 or send us an email.

Categorized in: Articles, Featured, Tips from The Inventor