Most of the companies have invested in a website in order to broaden their reach in the online sphere. But having a website is not the end of the game; a website has to rely on the search engine optimization or SEO strategy to overcome their competitors.
SEO tactics involve the use of desired targeted keywords in the website architecture, content and a comprehensive link building. These tactics help in improving the website rank in search engine page results (SERPs) which ends up in boosting the web traffic, conversion and sales. Over the years a large number of tricks has evolved to strengthen the SEO tactics and to increase their potential.
Reasons behind Major SEO Blunders
Most of the companies had become obsessed with improving their website and optimizing along with driving results that they started utilizing the black hat or gray hat techniques. The techniques are termed as unethical because they are aimed at giving pompous boost to the website search ranking by manipulating the loopholes present in search engines algorithms.
Such SEO tactics improve the website stats quiet astonishingly within a short period of time but it does get punished even severely if caught by the search engines. Google can bring upon its wrath on your search directly by giving it a deserving kick where page rank drops to almost zero in extreme cases.
Some of the Biggest SEO Blunders
BMW Faces Wrath of Google for Using Doorway Pages
Few years back in 2006 BMW German website named BMW.de found itself languishing back in the search engines page results even after using better keywords. BMW now gets frustrated with its website performance where it was doing pretty bad even in the “used cars” segment and it was losing against some of the major and minor websites.
What Does BMW Do Next?
The automobile company starts to artificially inflate their inbound links through the use of doorway pages in order to rank higher in the competitive keywords. It should be noted that doorway page is created only for the purpose of redirecting the unsuspecting visitors to the parent page which was BMW site main page.
Unfortunately this great plan of manipulating the SEO tactic to serve its own end doesn’t help much and Google gets a wind of this. BMW website receives a severe punishment in result where it gets blacklisted and glorious Page Rank of 0. Doorway is a big no-no in building a favorable and robust SEO strategy.
Toys R us Messed Up Big Time Even Having Toys.com Domain
‘Toys’ was the major targeted keyword for the Toys R Us website and to dominate this keyword result they bought the domain toys.com in 2010. The SEO strategy employed was simple where they were trying to dominate search results wherein whenever someone searches for the toys keyword their website will be on the first page. This will ensure an influx of millions of visitors.
The SEO Blunder Done By This SEO Team
They made the biggest mistake of failing to redirect their old URLs. With this Google took this as a new website and re-indexed as it is which saw their website take a nose dive in the search results. There was no use of black hat techniques but simple forgetting the redirecting of URL’s.
Overstock.com Buys Visits through offering Discounts For Promoting Links
In 2011 an online retailer named Overstock started encouraging colleges and universities to embed their website link in their website. In exchange they were provided with discounts on products listed on their website. It was a simple scheme of active link building in order to boost the website ranks.
SEO Blunder Done By Overstock.com
This strategy was completely viable unless Google found out that this particular websites getting too much influx of visitors through .edu websites. Within a few seconds overstock.com suffered from a punishment where its Page ranks fell and it was understood that trading discounts for the links is not a sincere way of boosting the web page rank at all.
I find it very informative and well written about SEO blunders but at the same time I felt all these blunders are very common you should introduce something new.
I have several sites some
of are built with black hat and white hat techniques, I have noticed that
white hat sites are upswing also well ranked and black hat sites drop in
ranking. After reading this article I found my mistake, it’s really helpful.
Thanks