SEO Mistakes to Avoid | 3 Black Hat Techniques That WILL Get You Banned from Google

You guys want to hear something interesting well today I'm gonna share with you all of my war stories of getting banned by Google hey everyone i'm neil patel and today i'm gonna share with you SEO mistakes that you should avoid and if you don't you're gonna get bad so the first one i have for you is building links through WordPress themes some people are still doing them and they're like oh my god this works whether it's through WordPress themes it's through widgets it's through you know like those little StatCounter badges or anything like that see back in the day I had a web hosting website I never provided web hosting but I ranked number one on Google for the term web hosting that's one of the most competitive terms everyone's going after it because they want affiliate commissions for a Hostgator Bluehost GoDaddy you name it and the way I rank really high was I bought a domain that had hosting in it or the term web hosting and then I bought a ton of WordPress themes instead of creating my own themes and putting the link at the bottom I just found all the popular WordPress themes that are already out there and that existed and I bought the themes right not just from the person for like 50 bucks I'm talking about these free themes that cost no money so let's say the creator of one of the themes would be David's Inc I'll hit up David and be like hey you create an awesome theme I'm just gonna buy the whole theme from you for ten thousand bucks in the whole business and the site and I'm gonna switch the bottom to say theme created by David zing to team created by let's say neo Patel's web hosting site and I'm not gonna give up the euro but it was web hosting something right you can fill in the blank and by doing that I was building a hundreds and thousands of links right away because I was buying all the most popular WordPress themes out there and sites within six months I shot up to the first page of Google for the term web hosting within another three months I shot up to the first spot and you know what happen Google eventually banned my website when I was ranking number one I was generating over a hundred thousand dollars a month in affiliate income that was great I'd even spend more than fifty thousand dollars buying a ton of themed sites and I did that over a period of six months so the income that I was generating was huge compared to my investment well I got banned and they only banned me and funny enough number two and number three we're using the same tack but Google didn't ban them and I think it was because people have been cheap a knows my site and they want to make an example nonetheless I learned don't do Shady link building tactics the second strategy I have for you is expired domain names there was a domain name that was named after a park one day it was battlefield something may be battlefield bypass or whatever it is and I bought this expired domain name because it was about like the civil war in America and I had all these edu links and I did something really creative and interesting and I'm no longer in this space so I'll tell you what all about it so with this battlefield bypass site what I ended up doing is I took the expired domain II put up casino related content and then I built a few links here there well all they do is just take a really old domain name that had a ton of authority you're talking about a domain name that cost over $10,000 that was expired and people like oh my god this thing has a high Google Pagerank and back then that matter now it doesn't I switched it all to casino related stuff and then boom, I popped up in the top three spots for the key term online casino and casino that's crazy right a bench eagle figured it out got banned lost all my money but when I was at the top I was making again six figures in affiliate income each and every single month if you notice a trend I used to do a lot of this stuff back in the day when I was a kid I stopped really doing this kind of stuff now cuz it's not long run and if you're not sure if your SEO strategy that you're using is gonna get you banned or if it's long run leave a comment and I'll tell you if you should be doing more of it or less of it because the last thing you want to do is put all this time and energy like I did and then get banned think long term the last strategy I have for you that eventually it will end up getting you banned or penalized or just crush your rankings is writing the same content over and over again see a lot of you guys have blogs and what you're doing with your blog and this won't really get you bad but more so it just drastically reduce your traffic you can be like what does all these Google updates happening why is my traffic keep going down and I used to be a victim of it myself after a while you've run out of topics to produce so you just regurgitate the same stuff over and over again and outright articles like the top ten marketing tools for SEO the top ten free Google tools that every SEO should be using the top 10 SEO tools for 2018 and then I would even have older ones a top 10 marking tools for 2017 and in 2016 and I did this each and every single year and I just regurgitate this information over and over again therefore SEO tools marketing tools social media tools and there are so much overlap in the content what ends up happening is when you have two articles or three articles that are on the same exact topic how does Google know which one to rank they don't instead what you should be doing is updating your old content and changing the 2017 to 2018 and making the tools more thorough deleting the old ones that no one uses anymore and by doing that Google's like oh cool you're updating your old content we should keep ranking it higher and higher because it's fresh they don't want to rank old content that's outdated I just recently bought a blog for a half a million bucks and this blog was like oh some months we get million unique visitors some once we get 800,000 visitors and they're like it's all seasonality it's not seasonality it's because they have the same content that's regurgitator over and over again and they have a lot of outdated content that talks about tools like feed runner which no marketers use anymore you delete all of that stuff and you prune the content and you update the old stuff what you'll find is your traffic won't just go up but it'll be way more consistent so in your blog you probably already have regurgitated content combined the less powerful ones so go to your Google Analytics look at the one that gets the least amount of search traffic and redirect it to the other one combine the content make it more thorough you have less duplicate content and take all your old content that just sucks and no one's reading anymore no one likes and delete it and redirect you to the most relevant post when you do that you're gonna get way more traffic you're not gonna get penalized and just gonna continually grow quarter-over-quarter sure if you avoid these three things there's no guarantee that your Google traffic won't go down but in the long run when you measure it year-over-year you should still be going up think long term and don't do short term tricks and tactics like I always do and be like oh yeah what kind of widget can I end up buying and put my name all over it it's not about that it's about longevity and follow these tips and you will have longevity

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