The 3 Biggest Mistakes at the Start of Your SEO Career – and How to Avoid Them

Being inexperienced is not a problem in itself. However, many SEO actions have long-term effects, and anyone who hasn’t seen a large number of projects risks running into big problems. An action that delivers excellent short-term results can land your site in a filter for years to come later on.

SEO is much more complex today than it was a few years ago, and not everyone may be aware of the risks involved with different SEO elements. That’s why we’ve tried to put together an assessment, to the best of our ability, of how risky each individual activity or measure can be. Of course, there are many different opinions on this, and it’s more or less impossible to assign an exact number. For example: what’s really the likelihood that someone at Google notices you have a hidden main heading and applies a manual action for it? That’s the caveat—now here’s the list.

Too many ads “above the fold” – risk 2 out of 5

From time to time, Google manually (using what they call a manual action) pushes down sites with too high a proportion of ads in the part of the page that’s visible without scrolling. If you have to scroll down quite a bit to reach the actual content because there are too many ads, you’re definitely taking a risk. As a rule of thumb, your page shouldn’t look like Google’s own search results page, which has a lot of ads “above the fold.”

Hidden content on the page – risk 2 out of 5

In the past, hidden content (placed only to rank better) was something Google cracked down on quite hard. A main heading that contains the keyword but isn’t visible, or a block of text hidden from users, could cause significant ranking drops if detected. These days, Google is better at automatically filtering out that type of content, so the risk has decreased somewhat. More often than not, it neither helps nor harms your site. Here’s a study we did on content hidden behind tabs.

Sitewide links – risk 4 out of 5

Links from every page of a site have, since Google’s Penguin update, become much riskier. The first thing people do when trying to get out of the Penguin filter is to clean up sitewide links. If these links also use exact match anchor text and are placed in less valuable areas (like the footer), this becomes a trap. It might give you quick rankings, but the risk skyrockets. This is one of the attributes we find most dangerous on a site, and it’s something we are very careful to avoid ourselves.

Exact match anchor text links – risk 3 out of 5

Exact match anchor text is when a link uses the exact keyword you want to rank for. This used to be the best shortcut to quick rankings, but now it’s quite risky if you’re not careful. It’s especially dangerous when combined with other risks—sitewide links with exact match anchor text or exact match anchors in link directories can quickly become a serious problem. More reading on links and anchor texts.

Link directories – risk 2 out of 5

Link directories are actually something we find less risky nowadays, provided you don’t use exact match anchor text. Our impression is that Google more or less just ignores them. There are cases where a directory can be useful, but we would never use anything other than brand names as anchor text here anymore. One of the funniest things we’ve done in recent years (and it’s good SEO too) was when we bought KTHNOC.se.

Links from bloggers – risk 2 out of 5

Strangely enough, links from bloggers are relatively high-risk (and something that’s hard to control). Many of the large Swedish blog hosting platforms have had major problems with Google, and most blogs are seen as low-quality sites in Google’s eyes. If you get a lot of links from bloggers, whether through collaborations or sponsorships, it carries significant risk. The truth is that many of the filters and manual penalties we’ve seen recently have come from blogger collaborations in one way or another. That doesn’t mean that blogs are bad in themselves—it just means you need to know what you’re doing when you engage with them.

404s – risk 3 out of 5

It goes without saying that an individual page returning a 404 will lose its ranking, but a large number of 404s on your site can cause Google to lose trust overall. This isn’t as dangerous as it used to be, but you should definitely keep an eye on the error messages you get in Webmaster Tools. Too many 404s can cause you to lose a lot of positions.

301s – risk 2 out of 5

A 301 redirect in itself isn’t dangerous—like most things on this list—but if you use them aggressively, the risk shoots through the roof. Buying a competitor and redirecting their site to your own was once a very elegant way forward, but it’s not nearly as rewarding anymore. Be cautious and meticulous with your 301 redirects.

Duplicate content – risk 2 out of 5

Duplicate content is a sneaky danger because it’s not always clear that it’s the problem, and it’s not always the original that survives. Large amounts of duplicate content can create major issues for the entire site in a way that isn’t immediately obvious—you might lose a few positions across the board rather than disappearing entirely. Compare that with specific cases where Google determines an article is duplicate, in which case it can vanish completely.

Indexing search results – risk 4 out of 5

This is one of the riskiest activities you can undertake on a site. Google has always disliked it, often describing it as webspam, and in recent years they’ve become much tougher on it, especially with the Panda update. It’s a method used by less scrupulous SEOs to quickly increase the number of landing pages on a site, which in turn allows them to rank for many more keywords while the site lasts. Since it’s almost effortless to generate millions of pages this way, it was often used for disposable sites to drive lots of traffic for a short time. Nowadays, however, Google reacts faster, and the return on that risk is far too small for most.

Too many pages – risk 3 out of 5

Having a lot of pages isn’t a problem in itself—Wikipedia, for example, can hardly be said to take a particularly high risk. However, quantity often means that the quality of individual pages decreases (as with search result pages in the earlier example), and that’s what can trigger the Panda filter. Since it’s also very difficult to recover from the filter, we assess the risk as 3 out of 5 because the impact when it hits is so severe.

Poor language – risk 1 out of 5

Bad grammar, spelling mistakes, or lots of profanity (!) are things that search engines don’t appreciate. In English-speaking countries this is a bigger issue than it is in Sweden—it’s clear that Google is much worse at understanding Swedish. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind. In the summer of 2021, Google made major changes in how it reads and ranks based on language.

Footer links – risk 2 out of 5

Footer links used to be among the riskiest types of links, but we assess that the risk has decreased somewhat in recent years—perhaps because few people are reckless enough to use exact match anchor text there anymore. Often, it seems that Google simply devalues these links, so the main risk is that they don’t count. However, you should still be careful with anchor text.

Footer links from your clients – risk 4 out of 5

We felt this point deserved its own explanation. The risk with footer links can escalate for different reasons, and one thing Google really dislikes is SEO agencies getting links from their clients. They have similar feelings about certain platform providers like e-commerce sites and blogs, though not always to the same extent. Google explicitly warns against this and has even highlighted it in their description of SEO. Compare this, for example, with guaranteed placements from SEO agencies or companies that sell fake traffic, which are only mentioned at the end under “Other things to watch out for.”

Launching a new site – risk 5 out of 5

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but launching a new site often carries the highest risk. The most common reason sites lose rankings isn’t actually filters or manual actions—it’s technical problems. A site launched without careful attention to SEO can run into very serious issues. A new URL structure, for example, can cause problems on a catastrophic scale for a long time ahead.

The biggest risk in SEO

We’d like to end with what is all too often behind SEO problems—for example, when launching a new site. That’s when you make changes that affect SEO without thinking about SEO. No SEO is dangerous SEO. It’s easy to believe, from the picture Google and some speakers paint, that as long as you keep your head in the sand there’s no danger. The truth is, that’s one of the riskiest behaviors you can have. You need to understand how SEO works if you want to run or grow traffic from search engines. Anything else is like walking through a minefield blindfolded.