29 Bad SEO Practices You Want to Avoid

We do not only learn what is “GOOD”, we also have to avoid what is “BAD”. Search Engine Land published a checklist of “worst practices in SEO” showing the bad practices that would hurt your website search engine rankings.

Book: "The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization"

1. Do you use pull-down boxes for navigation?
2. Does your primary navigation require Flash, Java or Javascript to function?
3. Is your web site done entirely in Flash or overly graphical with very little textural content?
4. Is your home page a “splash page” or otherwise content-less?
5. Does your site employ frames?
6. Do the URLs of your pages include “cgi-bin” or numerous ampersands?
7. Do the URLs of your pages include session IDs or user IDs?
8. Do you unnecessarily spread your site across multiple domains?
9. Are your title tags the same on all pages?
10. Do you have pop-ups on your site?
11. Do you have error pages in the search results (“session expired”, etc.)?
12. Does your File Not Found error return a 200 status code?
13. Do you use “click here” or any other superfluous copy for your hyperlink text?
14. Do you have superfluous text like “Welcome to” at the beginning of your title tags?
15. Do you unnecessarily employ redirects, or are they the wrong type?
16. Do you have any hidden or small text meant only for the search engines?
17. Do you engage in “keyword stuffing”?
18. Do you have pages targeted to obviously irrelevant keywords?
19. Do you repeatedly submit your site to the search engines?
20. Do you incorporate your competitors’ brand names in your meta tags?
21. Do you have duplicate pages with minimal or no changes?
22. Does your content read like “spamglish”?
23. Do you have “doorway pages” on your site?
24. Do you have machine-generated pages on your site?
25. Are you “pagejacking”?
26. Are you cloaking?
27. Are you submitting to FFA (“Free For All”) link pages and link farms?
28. Are you buying expired domains with high PageRank scores to use as link targets?
29. Are you presenting a country selector as your home page to Googlebot?

Examine your site against the list, how many are truth to your site? Avoid everything in the list. Want to know the reasons? Click here to read the explanation for each item.