Bad SEO practices aren’t what we consider a new term or act by bloggers but we would rather understand the harm it can impact to websites as what almost all bloggers do not know about.

Before we moved any further, I suppose it might relieve us if we learned what bad SEO actually means.

What is bad SEO?

Bad SEO is unethical practices, outdated or practices which seems to be outside of Google and bings webmaster guidelines. SEO on its own are practices which are geared towards optimizing your website for better search engine results. Doing or practicing bad SEO, you should have in mind that it can result in an opposite way for your website (we mean it can harm your website negatively by doing the opposite of what good SEO practice should).

Writing this article is to explain what I know and understand as the worst 7 SEO practices that you must strive to avoid as a blogger in 2018.

Since we have explained the Bad SEO, we wish to extend our hands to talk about what are those exact practices that can hurt your websites search engine ranking and as well generally considered the bad SEO.

Note: we are not sharing only the bad SEO practices, we are also writing what you must do to avoid them.

That being said, let’s look at the bad SEO practices.

Keyword Repetition.

Keyword usage is a very profitable SEO practice but it tends to get sour when one uses them severally.

Repeating the same keyword over and over again not because they are useful in the text but because you are supposed to optimize your copy is a very bad SEO practice.

This will reduce the level of visitors interact with your website and consequently bring your website visitors to the diminishing level. This also triggers search engines that you’re trying to trick them into coming up in first pages for organic search results.

It is better advised if you mentioned your keyword in the title, description, opening paragraph and a couple more times naturally in the text is better.

Guest Writing For Links and Traffic Referral

We discussed the bad effects of guest posting in one of our previous articles and here it is again lingering.

Last blogging year, several pro bloggers insisted on the best way to get backlinks to your website was through guest posting. Considering how true this is, if it is to be done wrong, it could damage your websites SEO.

You can publish or write for high-quality websites in your niche not for the purpose of getting links but for exposure and teaching.

You can refer to this my article here for an elaborated explanation of guest writing.

Hiding The Real Destination of a Link

Cloaking links and showing different versions of page crawlers and users was a common practice in the past but not anymore. Using such techniques now is actually a very very bad practice.

You could only keep one version of a page for both search engine crawlers and ensure that users can differentiate between website contents and ads.

Having Too Many Ads Above The Fold

Yes, this is a bad SEO practice which Google takes very seriously since google punishes websites that have too many ads above part of a page that is visible without scrolling (above the fold).

If you suddenly saw a decrease in traffic then you should check if you were affected by the page layout algorithm.

Not Using Google Webmaster Tools

Google developed the webmaster tools in order to establish a better connection with webmasters.

There is a ton of information you can get about your website and a lot of tools to help you understand how to improve your websites SEO and ranking in google.

You can check for things like bad links, crawl errors, duplicate titles and descriptions and much more be using your webmaster dashboard.


Having Numerous Outgoing Links

I believe you do know that your website doesn’t get damaged by the incoming links only?

The outgoing links as well can damage your website.

Websites having numerous outgoing links without using the “no-follow” tag can be considered as link farms or paid directories.

In general, you should “no-follow” any links in ads, comments, and websites that you do not trust fully.

Accepting Low-Quality Guest Post

You can also feature new writers in your blog and also publish new contents written by others in your website provided it is original.

Publishing a good and new content on a regular basis on your blog is a good SEO practice but it is highly important to keep balance with content produced from the website and content offered to the website in exchange for a link in the author bio.

Wrap up

What could be more important to a website than the websites SEO? I presume it could be said as nothing. Following good SEO practices that are ethical, based on google standard and up to date with the latest developments in google algorithms is the best shot for websites.


Some of the past SEO practices such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, massive link building and banner stuffing are a thing of the past and should be avoided totally.