When you get started in the online world it can be pretty tough. You have a website you spent a few days creating and then you need to produce the magic. Adding content is easy and you’re doing it daily. You even figure out how to add some affiliate links so you get money when people buy from your site. Now you sit down and smile because you know it’s soon going to be time to pack your belongings and move into a mansion. Then nothing happens and you don’t have a clue what’s wrong. There’s nobody landing on your site so you must figure out what to do.

You stick your head back in the books. After spending the next few weeks reading everything you can about marketing you finally come to the conclusion you need to start doing search engine optimization, so you get to work and start building thousands of backlinks to your site. Without warning your site disappears from the search engines. You’ve been de-indexed and it was because you performed SEO in the wrong way. Here are some things you definitely want to avoid before it’s too late.

1. Buying Cheap Backlinks

There is a reason why huge companies don’t buy one million backlinks from places like Fiverr, and that is because they are dangerous. One morning you could wake up and find yourself de-indexed from the search engines. Most people starting an online business are doing it because they don’t have much money. Don’t let this force you to start buying spam backlinks that could kill your site. The risk doesn’t equal the reward.

If you’re looking for quality backlinks at an affordable price, I recommend checking this post out.

2. Spinning Articles

Have you ever read an article that’s been put through a spinner? They end up using software that turns one article into a thousand. They are all unique which sounds great, but when you try reading them they don’t even make sense. It might sound like a good idea getting thousands of backlinks from the articles, but no human would ever read them and you’re hurting your reputation. If you care about how your articles appear to actual human readers, then please just write individual articles that you can post in a few directories.

3. Using Link Farms

Google ended up destroying link farms and wiping businesses off the map in a previous algorithm change. Some people are still having success with private link farms, but you’ve got to ask yourself, how long will this last? If you build your entire business around it, and it comes crashing down, you will be left with nothing.

The best thing you can do is stay away from them, unless you set something up yourself that is hidden from everyone.

4. Using the Same Anchor Text

Google gets smarter every day and it knows when you start going crazy with the same anchor text, which shouldn’t even be there in the first place if we’re being entirely honest. It looks like spam, and people wouldn’t usually link to your site this way. When you start building links from now on, you can still use keywords as anchor text, but just do it to a small percentage of them. Google will eventually find you and you’ll be rewarded for your patience.

5. Crazy On-Page SEO

There is on-page SEO, and then there is going absolutely crazy. People seem to go to the extreme in the hope that Google is looking to find what you want to rank for. When you have the main keyword stuffed into the first paragraph ten times it’s not going to help you. This isn’t 1996 anymore, so it’s time to start being sensible. You can still mention the keyword in the title and somewhere in the article, but including it too much will hurt you instead of giving you results.

About the Author:

Ben is the managing director of SEO Positive Limited, an innovative search engine optimization company based in UK.

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Filed under: Link Building • Search Engine Optimization • SEO

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