Five ways to alienate Google

Proper search engine optimisation is essential to your ecommerce website’s success. Here are five bad SEO techniques you need to avoid at all costs because they will alienate search engines such as Google.

There is little good of having a great ecommerce portal if no one can find it online. For your ecommerce site to become popular – and for you to increase your sales – it’s essential that you implement good SEO practices.

Ever since Google has been ranking websites, website owners have been trying to trick the search engine into giving their site a higher ranking – search engine optimisation. While some SEO practices are perfectly acceptable, others are not. What should you absolutely avoid doing?

Cloaking

This is the cardinal sin of SEO. Cloaking involves showing different content to search engines than what actual human users will see on a website. It doesn’t matter whether you have cloaked your website on purpose or not – Google views this as very, very bad and will slap your website with a penalty.

(You even run the risk of your ecommerce site getting banned and de-indexed!) Avoid at all costs.

Stuffing keywords

In a similar register, the practice of “stuffing” – where you use irrelevant keywords on your website, hiding them via the font colour or font size – is a no-no. Google (and other search engines) relies on your web content to decide what your website is about, and what search results it should appear in.

Don’t try to cheat – not only is it bad Google etiquette, but it will annoy users, who will simply bounce away from your site immediately.

Swapping/buying links

Another technique that many website owners use to increase their SEO is swapping or buying links from others. As part of its search engine algorithm, Google looks at in-bound links to determine a website’s credibility. It views links as endorsements.

While buying links won’t get you de-listed, Google  is pretty smart at deciphering whether links are organic or not. And if you get caught out, you’ll have wasted your money. It would be more effective to spend it on white-hat SEO practices.

Duplicate content

Another cardinal sin. Don’t just copy and paste text from other websites. One of the best things you can give your website is fresh, relevant and interesting copy – Google loves original content. You will be penalised if you’ve obviously taken copy from elsewhere.

Flash sites

Google does not like Flash as it cannot see what is going on as well as a regular site. While it may make your site visually appealing, generally it is not a good idea to build your site with Flash as it will work against you in search engine rankings. (The same goes for Javascript – search engines aren’t able to read it very well. So use it sparingly!)