Dangerous SEO Tips and Tricks

All of us acknowledge successful SEO techniques that will help websites fight for the highest positions: high quality content, relevant keywords, constant updates, backlinks from websites with a high DA…  Yes, yes, those are great, always required, but…

What about strategies you must not use if you don’t want to go to Hell one day? What about anti-SEO?

Even evil spirits couldn’t agree more with these bad deeds. Let’s learn what SEO strategies should never litter your website and the consequences of the same:

Werewolves will come to you by the light of a full moon to tear you to pieces for Keyword Stuffing!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: keyword stuffing is an excessive amount of keywords on a page and a reason for website visitors and Google to curse your site in the harshest manner because it will look awful!

The WebCEO team says: using this technique damages the users’ experience on your website – Googlebots are smart enough to detect unnatural language full of specific phrases, – you risk losing your readers and positions, because Google doesn’t sleep, but instead will prey on you in the middle of the night under the werewolves’ leadership. Say hello to the full moon!

Treat: you might get some new visitors.

Trick: Google will find out that something is wrong really fast due to its advanced algorithm and the relentless crawling of its Googlebot minions which will scratch your rankings “bit by bit”.

How to stay alive: use exact match keywords and synonymic phrases in places where those are reasonable and don’t insert them in each paragraph of your article.

Ghosts will not thank you for stealing their job with Cloaking!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: pretending to be someone you’re not will get you into trouble fast!

The WebCEO team says: Google’s algorithm is smart, really smart. It will instantly catch webmasters who hope to get top rankings by breaking the rules and, for example, adding some irrelevant but popular invisible keywords – white words on a white background – on a website’s page.

Treat: don’t expect any.

Trick: Google updates its algorithm constantly and it’s long been good at detecting websites that are optimized with the help of cloaking. It’s an awful attempt, so you better not go for it. Otherwise the punishment will come very soon. Say bye to your ghostly hopes of being in the top rankings this way.

How to stay alive: be honest and clear.

Vampires appreciate high quality blood but will bite you for Low Quality Guest Posts!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: just write a lot because quality is the last thing in this world anyone cares about.

The WebCEO team says: low quality guest posts will bring you down, destroy your reputation and let the Cullens haunt you. Not a great perspective, is it? And this touches both your bad writing for somebody else and somebody’s bad writing for your website. You can destroy your authority and close all the doors for further guest blogging.

Treat: if bad reviews are a treat, then you will be overwhelmed by those.

Trick: well, we suggest that the mentioned treat will be enough punishment for you, but in case it isn’t, just imagine how long it will take for you to clean up your reputation, how deeply depressed your website will be with such labels as “low quality writing”, “no value”, etc., just like Edward Cullen with his “always cheerful facial expression”. Low quality guest posts may contain spammy links to toxic websites, so Edward will cooperate with Google to teach you how to behave on the Internet.

How to stay alive: write your best, offer your content to authoritative sources, and maintain your image as a great writer.

Do you know what Frankenstein hates? Spammy Links. You’ll experience his wrath if he sees even one spammy link on your website.

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: you need links – you get links. How good or bad those are doesn’t matter at all.

The WebCEO team says: paid spammy links are bad. Why are they bad? Because they are: undeserved, possibly dangerous for users, such links have no value, as most of the time a webmaster buys these from small websites where content leaves something to be desired, and, as a result, their rankings go lower. Big and authoritative websites may sell valid directory listings which can be applied for from various WebCEO tools.

Treat: your backlink profile gets more links.

Trick: The Penguin is on its guard; those links will bring you a penalty from Google. Definitely not a winning situation.

How to stay alive: earn links using only your own strength: write well, follow the trends, update your website and increase your authority. Use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy to learn what websites link to your competitors, offer them a better alternative and get your valuable backlink. You will even learn which paid directories have a high domain authority with Google.

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Before you Create a Thousand Pages for Your Website, Consider Taking a Thousand Lashes

Witches & Warlocks

Weekly says: large quantities of scrawl and scribble is on the first place; scribble something on a lot of pages and get thousands of readers. Even two sentences per page will be great!

The WebCEO team says: if you think that a lot of pages with thin content will bring you success, you are wrong. Content is important, this is an undeniable fact. A lot of content will bring you value only if you give each page a great amount of quality. Then you will be a star, but you will have to spend some time on this as well. You can’t create a library of excellent material in three days. Sorry to upset you, those are the rules.

Treat: in the best scenario you will experience no changes in your ratings;

Trick: in the worst scenario your rankings will be decreased because your content will not be good enough for Google to show your website at the heights of the SERPs.

How to stay alive: teach yourself to prefer QUALITY OVER QUANTITY. Use WebCEO’s Internal Links Optimization Tool to learn which pages of your website brings value and work on those that are not so popular. Who knows, maybe you can eliminate some of them before they do any harm to your website.

Ghouls will eat your rankings because of Devious Redirects!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: because redirects summon evil, fill the Internet with them!

The WebCEO team says: let’s be clear here: irrelevant redirects that irritate users to their maximum are a lot more evil than just saying Boo to someone at a Halloween party. Let’s pretend a person goes to your website about dogs and comes to another one about cats. Not good. My favorite route is: to click on a play button to watch a video and then it magically starts to run a casino game. Not an equal exchange. Ghouls would eat the computer server such nonsense is hosted on to the last cable, no less. And I would help them.

Treat: you will be paid by a webmaster whose website you set a redirect to or you will get more people attending your second website.

Trick: people will leave your websites faster than sunlight touches the Earth at sunrise and Google will punish you with a stake through your heart (maybe not so harsh a punishment if you’re a good person otherwise).

How to stay alive: only useful redirects to other pages of your website! For example, if you deleted a page a user wanted to visit but set a redirect to a relevant article – that’s great, that’s a reason to say “thank you” because needed information came to a reader in the end.

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Use Clickbait Titles and skeletons will rattle your bones at night!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: clickbait titles are good to make the world evil because they irritate users a lot. Like really a lot.

The WebCEO team says: don’t do this or you’ll get ripped to shreds by readers. Haven’t you felt annoyed after clicking on such title tags as: “Google updated its algorithm. SEO is officially dead” and then reading an article about some minor changes that can’t bring any harm to the SEO world? SEOers’ hearts are not everlasting, you know, and we don’t want to join the skeletons in the readership graveyard too soon. People don’t like lying and misdirection. They will no longer visit your website for more news if you even once provided them with a blatant irrelevancy.

Treat: people will be attracted by clickbait titles and go to your website, thus increasing your traffic temporarily.   

Trick: they will leave your website and never come back. We suppose you also don’t like clickbait and know about bounce rates even without our reminders.

How to stay alive: we know that it is hard to attract viewers’ attention nowadays, however, don’t try to create news out of thin air, okay? Playing games with titles can be great as long as you can deliver. References to cultural, historical, political events or recent trends will always make your titles more interesting, but you better keep things relevant to your content.

Zombies will bury you after seeing your Meta Tag Snippets Full of Spam!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: put only keywords in your snippets. It doesn’t matter if there will be any sentences. Only keywords, even irrelevant ones.

The WebCEO team says: come on, guys, it’s almost 2024! Such an SEO strategy is so old and SO obvious. People don’t enter websites from over-optimized snippets that contain only keywords from your query, even without context sometimes. In 2023 we understand that these snippets can hide redirects, irrelevance, advertisement pages, doorway pages, cloaking, even ordinary visitors understand this. Just don’t dishonor your website.

Treat: we can’t deny the fact that somebody still can enter your site this way. A zombie definitely will.

Trick: Google doesn’t sleep at night and all those tricks will end with a bite and no new viewers.

How to stay alive: real meta descriptions will kindly invite people to your website. However, if your site is mainly for revenue and full of black hat SEO tactics, then no advice will help.

At this year’s Halloween Party, don’t become an Evil Clown with Cookie Stuffing!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: we are here for money, so let’s drop cookies and cheat as if we are living our last day on Earth.

The WebCEO team says: cookie stuffing (dropping) is illegal and dangerous because you might get caught and punished hardly. The deal here is money. In a nutshell, a webmaster of a website you decided to visit secretly drops cookies of another website he or she cooperates with in your browser, as if you visited it clicking on the advertisement. Then he or she gets money from this. This heinous type of fraud is popular nowadays.

Treat: money from your evil partnership.

Trick: sooner or later you will be detected; there a lot of tools nowadays that will help complete this faster.

How to stay alive: just don’t use cookie stuffing at all, only clear links and honest payments. Otherwise you will be sued.

If you practice Article Spinning, a goblin will steal all your original content and leave you with nothing!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: article spinning is popular on the Internet and we should take part in spreading this corrosiveness, because we, busy people, never have enough time to create new content of our own.

In simple words, you can make a synonymic text out of another text so that for a search engine it would look like a totally new article. A webmaster gets new material for a website, and the Internet gets another website page with the skillful usage of a dictionary’s worth of synonyms. You’ll have an easy and non-time consuming way to update your site with new content without making any real effort because there a lot of tools for this.

The WebCEO team says: Don’t do this unless you are updating and replacing your own old content (in which case you probably won’t have to use synonyms).

Treat: a webmaster can save time in providing a great amount of repurposed content on a website.

Trick: Google Panda and Penguin are really good at detecting such schemes and presenting you with a penalty. And you will spend ten times more time trying to revive your website’s reputation.

How to stay alive: spend some time and write a unique copy that will not contain others’ thoughts. Readers and search engines appreciate good, unique content. Use WebCEO’s Content Submission Tool to spread your content over the Internet in an honest way.

The Grim Reaper will glue you to your screen forever if he detects one more intrusive pop-up on your website.

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: pop-ups are treasure, let’s put them everywhere and add more chat windows and cookie alerts to make users lose their temper.

The WebCEO team says: an enormous amount of pop-ups, chat windows and big cookie alerts altogether on the page may harm user experience. These hide all the content on a website making it inconvenient and sometimes even impossible to learn and process what the website is even about. According to Google, this is the worst thing you can do. Your website’s success depends on your users’ impressions after visiting, and this will be clearly seen in the bounce rate. The higher the rate, the worse.

Treat: another opportunity to show various advertisements and annoy visitors.

Trick: say goodbye to new users.

How to stay alive: think twice before showing intrusive pop-ups and never show all the windows simultaneously. There is no necessity for this. Think of your users and make their presence on your site as comfortable as possible. People should clearly see how they can remove those pop-ups. Under no conditions should you force them to hit the CTRL-Minus Sign so they can click on an X to close a pop-up. Most people don’t even know how to do that. They will just leave your site.

The Nightwatcher will destroy your candy-filled dreams if it sees another cheap takeover on your homepage!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: let’s prepare the lowest quality takeover and let the blood flow from your users’ eyes!

The WebCEO team says: takeovers are a thing that should be swept from the earth in our honest and humble opinion. Cheap and ugly takeovers include obnoxious games or films that are not relevant to a website’s niche… What can be more annoying? Right – nothing (except maybe Dracula). And our advice is to avoid those.

Treat: revenue generated from an advertisement takeover.

Trick: irritated users who will no longer have a lot of desire to visit your website.

How to stay alive: if you want to create a takeover – make it relevant, simple and not annoying.

You sacrificed the user experience and summoned a demon cat. Now it will eat your soul.

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: Is your website up and running? That’s all you’ll ever need. If you build it, they will come – just relax and wait for users to drop by.

The WebCEO team says: Users may or may not be satisfied with how your website works. Fortunately, you can analyze their activity by viewing the data in Google Analytics. Make your current and future plans based on how users interact with your site.

Treat: Happy users make you happy in turn.

Trick: High bounce rates, fewer visits, dwindling authority and plummeting revenues.

How to stay alive: Connect your WebCEO project to Google Analytics and read the reports on user engagement at least once a week. If you notice decreasing user activity on any of your money-making pages, that’s your cue to try and find out what is wrong with it.

The witch is upset because you ruined her mobile user experience, so she brewed this magic potion to turn you into a newt. You won’t get better.

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: Large screens are the best! Everybody who’s not browsing the Web on one is missing out. It’s their own fault and they don’t matter.

The WebCEO team says: Half of all global Internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Clearly, mobile user experience is too important to ignore. Google stated the same plenty of times and even made a bunch of ranking signals directly tied to mobile UX.

Treat: Other than your website working like a charm when you open it on a smartphone? More visitors who turn into customers, as well as higher rankings and your status as an authority.

Trick: If you don’t make your site mobile-friendly, you will alienate 50% of your potential audience PLUS the PC users who can’t find you because your overall rankings dropped. Who’ll be missing out then?

How to stay alive: Put in some effort to make your website mobile-friendly – here’s a tool to help you out.

You put up a scarecrow in your yard. It told you to put up another. And another. And another. And another. The scarecrows ate you, and now they are eating each other.

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: More of the same is better! Take pride in what you do and show off your work. If you have many site pages on the same topic, that’s a sign of a real expert.

The WebCEO team says: Web pages are always competing for rankings, and you don’t want internal struggle on your own site. If multiple pages are discussing the same topic, they most likely have the same keywords. And if they do, Google will have to give most of them low rankings because there can be only one winner.

Treat: One page which goes really in-depth, answers many questions on the subject AND has neatly organized, well-structured content? When done right, it can become a masterpiece worthy of high rankings.

Trick: Search engines will have a hard time properly ranking your site’s pages. Even your best content may end up buried on SERP #2 or deeper.

How to stay alive: “One page per target keyword” is the golden rule. If you have multiple pages optimized for the same keyword, either look for a way to merge their content or get rid of redundant content until only one page remains.

The Devil is rolling his eyes because you still don’t use the WebCEO platform!

Witches & Warlocks Weekly says: The Internet is an extremely dangerous place and you need powerful protection. There are so MANY alarming tools you may use which will bury your website and make your rankings boil in Hell’s cauldron in the end. So use just any cheap SEO tools. The dude downstairs would like that a lot.

Treat: without WebCEO you will not be able to stand against threats circulating around your website. Your treat will be that Halloween will truly be scary for you and isn’t Halloween about being frightened?

Trick: Seventeen tools will help you manage your website performance and increase your rankings day by day. Now that’s a trick you’ll want to play at Halloween.

Good night, sleep tight

Don’t let the dead links bite.

But if they do, then go to WebCEO

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