What You Should Do And Don’t While Writing Website Content?

Content writing is a crucial part of website business as sites communicate with their customers through their content like About Us and Contact Us. Also, content is used for website optimization and promotion. Google has released several guidelines regarding content creation and publication.

Quality content not only improves page rank but CTR as well but creating good pieces of content is a time consuming and expensive affair. For this reason, CEOs are always looking for quick ways to achieve high rank and CTR. But Google doesn’t allow manipulation of content.

Here are 8 ways of manipulating content that can improve page rank and CTR but also get your website penalized by Google.

1. Duplicate Content

Two competitor sites could use similar content is no longer followed. Just like website design, the content has to be different. Google Panda is keeping a close watch on every website to keep a tab overuse of duplicate content. It is for the publishers to make sure that the content they’re using isn’t copied or stolen from any other site.

2. Content Automation

It is a process of content creation using various tools and scripts. The process is quick but irrelevant as no writing-rules are followed. Simply put, it is written with the sole purpose of getting rank and not for users. No style or format is used and also no images, HTML headings and paragraph spacing are used. Content automation can provide you a load of content in no time but this content could result in rank loss and even the site could be blacklisted on search engines.

3. Bait and Switch

It is a creative way to fool Google and achieve high rank and CTR. You create a webpage with quality content and the page achieves high rank on targeted keywords. Once it is well placed on top position on SERPs, you replace the page with another page that you actually want to promote. Google can’t see the manipulation and the site continues to get benefitted by high rank. But today it can get your banned.

4. Article Spinning

It is like rewriting a piece of content using a tool or doing it manually. Here you don’t care about user value or the quality of writing as your only objective is to make the content look good before search engine. But it is considered Black Hat SEO and is prohibited by search engines. But you are allowed to rewrite a piece of content as an update for users.

5. Scraped Content

Scraping is a more refined way of content automation. Here you scan the web to find relevant content for your business and publish it on your site. Also, you can make slight changes in the content to make it more suitable for your site. It looks like a great idea to generate quality content for your users but it is also an infringement of copyright act. Since you’re stealing content from other sites and publishing it as yours, you are doing an illegal business.

6. Cloaking

It is a tricky way of creating content. Here you create two types of content – one for Google and another for user. Google can’t see what user can and vice versa. In this way, you can make a fine balance between keywords and information. But it isn’t allowed and sites showing cloaked content are blacklisted from SERPs. Google Penguin can sense cloaking on sites and remove the sites from results.

7. Malicious Active Content

When content is displayed using software through animated sites, Javascript, Java Applications or through browser plugins. It is used for displaying videos and audio files and also to download files on the computer. Malware used for publishing content is adware, Trojan horses, bots, spyware, bugs and worms. This kind of content isn’t only against search engine guidelines but illegal as well.

8. Clickbait

It is a technique used to increase number of clicks hence clickbait. Here you write attractive headline using deceptive ways. For instance, you can use words like shocking, important, free and unbelievable in the heading but there would be noting unbelievable in the offer. Sites that earn from number of clicks use this technique but clickbait has little effect on CTR and on the contrary, it is harmful for website ranking and credibility in the long run.

Content is necessary for website business but it doesn’t mean that you should use tricky ways of generating content. Don’t try fooling Google as it is quite sensitive regarding content issues.

Conclusion

SEOs are looking for ways to manipulate content but Google doesn’t allow manipulation. It wants to give satisfactory results to its users and handpicks sites that use relevant content. Websites should optimize only relevant and informative content. But there is nothing unethical or illegal in getting content ideas from other sites.