SEO have any disadvantages?

SEO have any disadvantages? Can u share if there is?
thanks!

Some SEO practices can involve bad coding practices, and if you get up to dodgy SEO practices, you can get punished by search engines. So it pays to know what you are doing and not ingratiate yourself to the serach engines.

Does SEO have disadvantages…

In concept, SEO really doesn’t have a downside beyond the use of time [and that should be justified by the result] but in practice it’s easy to lose sight of what matters and get focused on links, pagerank or other elements that have no correlation to results.

You can see this in practice right here when people stop focusing on results and become glued to se factors. The backlink value of a social link is generally low but that doesn’t mean social is even a slightly bad place to invest time or resources into, yet people draw that conclusion.

The same is true of sites themselves. Often we see webmasters become so focused on optimization that they forget to make their sites work or make sense and as a result, a well ranked site can’t hold it’s visitors.

But those are about how people approach SEO, not that they approach it.

It depends on what you mean by SEO - if you mean making the page easier to understand so that search engines and real people can understand it easier then there’s no downside. If you mean trying to rig the content for the search engines and presenting real people with garbage then the downside is that everyone will leave your site straight away and tell everyone it is garbage so that fewer people will visit.

The biggest disadvantage to SEO is those that do it.

Like many others, I spend a lot of time on this forum, and more often than not we see some terrible posts from people pushing terrible information or making basic posts without searching so that they can get an intelligible answer, most likely to relay back to a potential client when doing work for them.

SEO in itself is not a bad thing, and is at best a tiny subset of online marketing and best-practices that should be known by managers and developers. However, entire industries have been built around the exploitation of any written or spoken word from Google representatives in order to fabricate new “SEO rules”. One only has to look at sites like Search Engine Roundtable and SEOMoz to see the sheer amount of rubbish that is posted about SEO. To make matters worse, to justify their lies they often post statistically-incorrect “research” to justify the work they do.

The reason why this is a disadvantage is because people listen to this nonsense and ruin their sites. Incorrect information is dangerous, and if more people were to exercise logic and caution when performing SEO-related tasks everyone’s lives would be a lot easier.

thanks for sharing,

For me… The only disadvantage of SEO is if you do not use it well… If your always do a spamming. Also if you do a Black Hat SEO, it could affect the reputation of your site and cause penalty by Google.

The biggest disadvantage in my opinion would be the amount of time you spend on an SEO campaign may not produce desirable results and your hard work and effort won’t have paid off.

You have to plan the whole campaign carefully and you must be meticulous.

  1. Not flexible. You cannot do whatever you want with these.
  2. Hardly customizable. They a hardly ever changed.
  3. Those sites aren’t necessarily done by people that knew what they were doing (I’m not say they don’t, I’m saying there’s no guarantee) there is probably no robots.txt in there for say, google to crawl it properly.

If your site is new i.e less than 1 year of age and you create bulk of backlinks per day then you can penalized by google.

If you are abusing and mostly use the black hat method for SEO then you are like promoting a scam or spamming… I think that is the big disadvantage of SEO.