Negative off-page SEO factors can cause attacks on your website in form of hacking, spam links, content duplication, fake social profiles or hacking your online profile, removal of good back links and much more shockingly! It’s very difficult to handle the negative impact once occurred, so it’s always the best to prevent negative SEO in first place.

Matt Cutts, the former head of Google web spam team talks about negative SEO here; he says it’s easy to prevent a set of links from back linking to your site when you think those links would downgrade your site rank. Well, what are those Off page SEO techniques/ off-page SEO activities you should keep away from, so you don’t degrade your site rankings? Below is a list of those off page optimization techniques to be avoided,

• Forum marketing: It’s a marketing technique where businesses do the promotions via online forums where people discuss on a specific subject in a thread. The SEO value is very minimal in this technique. So until all the formal techniques have been applied, it’s not a great idea to spend time on this
• Submitting your sites to the major search engines was a must years ago but not anymore among the off-page SEO factors. Websites needn’t pay anything in order to appear in search engine results unless you are looking to appear in the paid listings of the results page. A website being shown for a specific set of keywords is no way connected to the site submission to the engines; you got to work on keywords, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO so the search engine algorithms pick you on the relevant searches.
• Article marketing is the technique where you write a unique article on your niche and share it to the article directories from where back links would direct people to your website. This was a great success at a point of time but not anymore due to the poor quality writers, bad quality stuff in directories, duplicate articles, dumps of backlinks within the article and a few other sick practices. You might be caught by Google panda if you go for such ill ways of marketing. If you have a good quality unique article adding real worth to your site, then do post it using own blogs or guest blogging options
• Website directories, listing websites based on categories and subcategories and not on keywords, serve no help today. A lot of website directories are banned or penalized by Google when the practice was being misused. Google looks at content, on page SEO, off page SEO, user engagement, click through and many more factors today to mark a site as trustable and relevant for the subject. So don’t waste time on pushing your site into directories for namesake
• Bookmarking sites are used by people to store the web pages they would want to come again. Social bookmarking websites are good in driving traffic but it depends on the site you choose. Social bookmarking buttons added to your site may increase traffic; adding them to your blogs may allow users to save and share your web page. But this is a rare idea of your site to go viral because these bookmarking sites are updated so often that you may reap a very minimal benefit. StumbleUpon is known to show even 95% bounce rates at times. Unless you have a great content, you are wasting your effort in this marketing method
• Websites that purely produce comments on blogs, for adding the link to a site in those comments, was a great method to drive traffic to that specific site a few years ago but not anymore. You can write a great blog and link another great blog page in yours; make sure you link to the specific blog page and not to the main page of the other blog site. You also need to keep in mind that you can’t link your site in the comments section of most websites! So it’s not a great SEO method to follow.
• Being on a lot of social media isn’t a great idea as it may seem to you because you are increasing your load of concentrating on a lot of resources accessing all those media. Instagram users mostly fall between the ages 18 and 29 while facebook has users aged between 18 and above (taking shoppers into account). It’s necessary you choose the media based on who the audience is and where they are. For a boutique web design business, LinkedIn is great as is for any B2B business.
• Don’t do keyword stuffing. Google just chucks you out on basis of irrelevance and unethical tactic! Same is the case with doorway pages; never do such things.
• You will get penalized for cloaking; never do a page for users and another for google. Do your best in all your website pages that offer the best to users and google cannot avoid giving you a high rank! This is one of the most important off-page SEO factors to be kept in mind.
• It is important for you to understand that not all backlinks are getting you traffic or a chance to rank higher, instead, it could be harming your rankings. Make the choice wisely.

We believe you have a good understanding of some of the harmful SEO techniques to be avoided if you target to be in Google’s good eye. If you have any questions or would like to seek assistance in any area, do ask our experts at qeagency.