Negative SEO Tactics That Will Kill Your Rankings [infographic]

Never Trust A Zombie!

As I'm sure you know, there are zombies everywhere, just waiting to attack. Some may have infiltrated your SEO Company. Be sure to protect yourself against those negative search engine optimization techniques that have been dead for years. Trust me, they will suck the life right out of your website.

Check out this infographic by Rankpop guys, that lists some "zombie SEO" examples that Google don't like and are equally horrible to the visitors who visit your site or blog.

10 black hat techniques that kill a website's rankings

Keyword Stuffing

It's a well known fact zombies gorge on human brains. A little known fact is that they also are involved in keyword gorging or keyword stuffing. Which is a SEO technique that involves overloading keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant to a specific Web search.

Portal Pages

How do you think zombies get here? A portal of the living dead, of course. How do you think people get better rankings? Portal pages! Portal pages are used to manipulate search engine rankings deliberately. These pages are usually stuffed with keywords, and are created for the sole purpose of being crawled by search engine crawlers so that they rank well for these keywords in the SERPs. I don't know about you, but I think I'll be keeping my distance from each of these portals.

Unrelated Keywords

Have you ever heard a conversation amongst zombies? It's like they are speaking another language. Some SEO companies implement this same strategy using irrelevant keywords in order to rank of them, and get traffic from unrelated/irrelevant keywords. Google does not have gibberish as a language selection, so why would you trust them with your keywords?

Cloaking

Zombies are full of trickery, in their personal life and in their SEO expeditions. Cloaking is showing different spiders as opposed to human traffic. In other words, spiders see a website and all its content while visitors see a specific page. Just like Harry Potter Zombies also utilize their cloaks.

Page Swapping

Trading is the name of the game. Zombies specialize in haggling and trading goods and services. That's why Zombie SEOs are so good at page swapping. Page swapping is a process replaces a web page that has a high ranking in the search engines with a low ranking page to optimize this low ranked web page. Never trust a haggler. You'll get burned.

ShapeShifters

Zombies have one thing in common with Iguanas, they blend in. This is very similar to the hidden text strategy they use to trick Google. Hidden text is content which your visitor cannot see, but which is still readable by the search engines. The idea is to load a web page with keywords and keyword phrases that would be unsightly to visitors but that would improve the page's rankings in the search engine results, and to do so without letting your visitors see the text. Who are we kidding. You don't want to trick Google, that is not a good idea even for a zombie.

Link Farms

This comes into relevancy during the "dry season". The dry season for zombies lasts from November-March, when the humans stay inside. Just as dry seasons affect zombies, they also affect SEO companies that rely on shady link farms for their clients. A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) created only for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links. Given the intelligence level of zombies. I'm not sure I would trust their farming skills or techniques.

Duplicate Content

There are over 100,000 twins zombies roaming the earth, you may run into the same but different zombie many times, it can be very confusing which is the goal. Some SEO companies use the same technique, which is duplicating content that appears on the internet in more than one place. When there are multiple piece of identical content on the internet. It is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. Don't be fooled, duplicate content is very common, and very dangerous to your site. Keep your eyes peeled.

Social Networking Spam

Zombies are social creatures, and love to network. Social networking is fine, as long as you don't use it for evil. This is an approach they use in black hat SEO they target demographics on social networking sites and message people with advertisements. And no one appreciates that!

Twitter is Most Used Network Cyber-squatting

Zombies are very specific about the kind of brains they eat, there have been reported cases of them keeping a human even though it is not their preferred brain, and trading it at an elevated price to another zombie. Some companies have also been known to do this with domains. It's called cyber-squatting. Cyber-squatting is registering, selling or using a domain name with the intent of profiting from the goodwill of someone Else's trademark.