Bad SEO and how to fight it

SEO in everything

SEO dominates the web, and not just ecommerce, but EVERYTHING, because everyone wants to be well positioned. From an online store, to a corporate website, through a blog, a facebook group, a youtuber … that’s it. If you search on Google to learn SEO or How to make SEO, you’ll find that there are more than half a million pages on how to position your projects and get rich along the way. But out of all those pages, only a few talk about what happens if you do a bad SEO (or you leave it halfway and never take it up again).

First of all, what is bad SEO?

Basically, it’s the practices or tactics that are unethical, obsolete or outside of Google’s guidelines for all sites. While it’s true that the premise behind search engine optimization is to optimize a site for Google and other search engines, bad SEO can generate the opposite results.

That is to say, that after you’ve done all the hard work, not only have you not improved your positioning, but you’re actually making it worse. So you’ll have to focus your efforts to get back to the beginning point, having wasted our time and probably hating SEO along the way.

Most bad SEO is done for two reasons: Not knowing well the tool (the main one), and malpractice by excessive SEO (ie, that the code of a site is modified too much in search of a better positioning, but as a result, you’re destroying things along the way).

Things that cause bad SEO

Bad SEO doesn’t come out of nowhere. You (or your SEO manager) generate it, and it translates into different and very specific actions. Here is the TOP FIVE of the biggest SEO mistakes.

1. 1. Create bad and fast content

      It’s true that Google now gives more importance than ever to content, and having a good original content is very beneficial for SEO, hence why lately Content Marketing is more important than ever.

      The content of a page must have a pragmatic objective, that is to say, it has to be useful. Generating low quality content in which we only seek to have more volume of text to introduce more keywords will make our bounce rate rises like foam, and Google won’t like it. You, more than probably, might be punished somehow.

      There is also the classic and most common thing on the Internet: copy and paste. If we do that, what we’re generating is duplicate content, something that Google doesn’t like at all and for which, surely, it will give us a good warning or even worst. It’s better to use your inspiration and rewrite than copying, since copying it’s useless.

      Doing this botched job, our users don’t get what they’re looking for and so, they won’t return, (in addition to St. Google getting annoyed and giving your site a good penalty). This is important, that’s why it goes first, because not taking into account this point will lead us directly to the next mistake.

   2. Create many pages and categories to generate content

      Many ecommerce create a lot of pages related to the same selection of keywords, targeting the same keywords in hopes to get them all positioned. For example:

      • Garden furniture
      • Cheap garden furniture
      • Second hand garden furniture
      • Quality garden furniture
      • Eco-friendly garden furniture
      • Vintage garden furniture
      • Modern garden furniture
      • Handmade garden furniture

      In this case what we’re generating is keyword cannibalization. Google won’t know which garden furniture page is the most important and will probably decide that none of your garden furniture pages is actually important enough to show it in the search results page.

      If you want to rank for a specific keyword, what you should do is dedicate one of your pages to that keyword and start generating (good and quality) content only on it. That will make it “weigh” with something specific, and Google will index it better.

   3. Use underscores instead of hyphens for URL’s

      The thing about having a computer scientist do SEO for you is that he will probably use underscores to separate words in the URLs Because most programming languages work that way, so out of pure habit, they do it like that. But… Google doesn’t like underscores. So let’s see:

      • BAD: https://www.innovadeluxe.co.uk/sub_folder/name_of_file.html
      • GOOD: https://www.innovadeluxe.co.uk/sub-folder/name-of-file.html

      If we have a large ecommerce with many products, changing all the URLs can be almost an impossible task, although there might be a way to do it through programming or similar. One way or another, at least, I hope this advice will serve for future URLs. So you’ll start improving from there.

   4. Too many tags

      We misuse tags. We tend to put too many tags, thinking that it will help us to position better or find the content, but we’re really doing it wrong. The original idea of tags is to group content on a topic in the same place so that the user can easily find related content. But it has become a system to try to position the more words the better. What we generate with this is a huge duplicate content problem, because by creating many tags for the same article, we are creating a lot of pages that only contain that article.

      What to do? Well, go back to its origin and use the tags as a search method and not to attract SEO traffic, i.e., define its content so that it can be properly archived and found, but not to improve the positioning. That will come later, but don’t use them for that.

      5. Don’t use external links because you think they steal your traffic

      Many people don’t link to quality external sites from their website, or try to do it as little as possible, because they believe that they make them lose visits. But that’s not true. Linking to quality external content helps Google to see us as a reference site within the network of networks. That is, it’s something that not only doesn’t penalize us, but it helps us to have a better position within the search ranking.

What recommendation or SEO mistake would you recommend to avoid when someone launches an online store? Let us know in the comments!

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