5 innocent practices that could be sabotaging your SEO

Buying a pre-owned domain name, deploying a CDN, using Bootstrap CSS classes, utilizing robots.txt – sounds innocent enough? They could be the cause of your SEO woes! Some of these points might sound like common sense, but they are real problems that have had significant impact in some projects we’ve come across. Yet, the solutions weren’t [easily] found on Google.

Has your site been labelled as Pure Spam? This is a death sentence to any kind of SEO efforts that you may have been working on. Your site probably won’t even be listed for any kind of search. To check if your site has any issues, add your site and all its variations (e.g. searix.net and www.searix.net) to Google Webmaster Tools, and read the “Manual Actions” tab.

So what innocent practices could cause Google to classify your website as Pure Spam?

 

#1 – Using CSS to hide content

One of our clients had designed a site with lots of pre-filled content in their prototype website. Before moving to production, they applied the Bootstrap CSS “hide” class to a whole block of content that they were going to save for a later time. This is also equivalent to using:

display: none;

This particular block of content took up about 70% of the code on the index page, was unintentionally keyword-rich (sample titles and excerpts of blog articles related to the industry), and did not have mechanism of any kind (manual or automatic) to make that content visible to the end user.

Google apparently doesn’t algorithmically mark such a practice as spam. Although Matt Cutts wrote that a decade ago, it still makes sense because the “Pure Spam” notification was quick to appear under the “Manual Actions” tab.

Remember: Hiding content with CSS should only be done if that content is going to be visible somehow, whether via a user’s action, or an automatic trigger. If that’s not going to happen, comment the code or remove it entirely.