SEO is a great tool to get your website ranked on the search engines. Spamming is whereby someone utilizes black hat SEO, incorrect SEO techniques or over optimizes the website. Many search engines like Google try their best to penalize such sites and in their recent Update they can easily identify spam content or spamming by a website hence it is important to be on the safe side and practice White hat SEO. Today we will talk about how to protect your website from Google’s Penguin update:
The most common reasons for Website spamming
1. Copy pasting Content – This is quite a common spamming violation. Google is heavy handed on duplicate or copy pasted content as it wants the web to be clean and protect other people’s website’s integrity too. Lowcostseo always emphasize on the need for fresh and unique content for your blog or website.
2. Keyword Stuffing – This is simply when webmasters use their keywords frequently on their pages and ignore the patterns of keyword density. Most search engines accept around 5-7% and going over this might result in Keyword stuffing too.
3. Small sized text and invisible text – Many webmasters sometimes in a bid to increase their SEO campaign tend to go overboard by using invisible text. All search engines indicate these sort of techniques as spam. Unnecessary text is also indication of spam so make sure all the text on your website is visible to read and the proper size too.
4. Page Redirection – The usage of Java, Refresh tags, Javascript on a webpage to direct visitors from one page to another web page is also a bad technique to use, and regarded as spam.
5. Meta Tag Stuffing – After keyword stuffing, Meta tag stuffing is also a big problem in the spamming issues. Repetition of keywords or unrelated keywords could also indicate as spam.
6. Link Farms – We all know what an impact a link farm or link exchange can have on a website’s popularity. Well a negative impact it will be. Avoid buying links in bulk as this is a bad SEO technique and only result in either your site being penalized by search engines.
7. Ignorance of the Search Engine Guidelines – Submission of the same website several times to the search engines too is not good practice and is known
Below is a great info graphic outlining the evolution of Spam. Marketo have created this for everyone so that you adhere to the best marketing practices.
Today we will touch on the topic of how to avoid spamming on a website. The following are the tips to follow:
- Always make sure that your keyword density is below 5%. When writing an article ensure it is minimum 500 words, if an articles is below 350 words then search engines mark that out as spam content.
- Utilize the content related keyword. Lowcostseo provides Keyword research which is the best technique to find the best possible keywords to target for your SEO campaign.
- Cut down the use to unwanted, unrelated or unnecessary keywords in your text. Always make sure the right keyword has been used in the right place and it is not repeated again especially in the Meta tags.
- Invisible text or text that is smaller in size should not be used as it hampers the visitors experience and is simply not readable.
- Do not use webpage or blog redirection or refresh tags as that is simply bad SEO practice.
- Avoid Black hat SEO techniques at all cost, Google penalizes all such practices.Link farm being one of them which is used to simply bump up your popularity. Avoid using it all cost.
- Finally, make sure that being a webmasters you always read the terms and conditions before submitting your website to search engines. Practices such as renaming your sites before submission are known as good SEO practices.
One thing we have noted is that, as soon as you have created your Content Management System (CMS) you will inadvertently invite spammers there after. These spammers will try to post on your site via the comments box or contact box. They will talk about their website and how brilliant it is or talk about your site and then later on tell you to click on their site link. What they are trying to do is get links from you, they will spread their site URL all over the net in a bid to create great visibility and traffic too. It sure is very annoying spending time every day simply deleting these comments that give no importance to you or even feedback. Some spammers are pretty convincing that you will not know if they are spamming or genuinely speaking the truth.
So now you might be asking, how can I avoid this happening on my site?
Firstly, create a notification system so that you get an update whenever a comment or feedback is left for you to review it as soon as possible. So as soon as a notification is made, act swiftly and delete all of the unwanted spam.
Moderate the comments is another way to control this. Make sure you control on what you want to be seen on the webpage and not them. In this case, you click to approve or disapprove their comments at your own peril.
if you get lots of spam comments then there is service to control this, its called Akismet, they charge a small fee to filter through your spam comments. Simply create an account at Akismet and they will do all the dirty job of removing and sifting through the spam for you at a minimal cost.
If you want another solution, then opt for installation of a validation key like CAPTCHA. It sure does a decent job in deterring spam on a website.
We hope you follow some of the above methods or techniques and tell us if you have any other solutions to share with our bloggers?