By Giriman Sachdeva

Video: The Truth About SEO: Are Your Backlinks Hurting Your Rankings? (Modlingua Live)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps people find useful pages. Shortcuts that mislead search engines or readers can do the opposite. In this video summary, Giriman Sachdeva explains three practices to recognise: cloaking, keyword stuffing and manipulative links.

Cloaking and keyword stuffing

Cloaking means showing search engines one version of a page and readers another to manipulate rankings. Keyword stuffing means repeating words or numbers unnaturally just to influence search results. Google's spam policies warn against both. A clear page should say the same thing to visitors and search engines, and use terms where they help the reader.

Links should earn their place

A backlink is a link from another site to yours. Relevant editorial links can help readers discover a useful resource. Buying links or building a network solely to manipulate rankings falls under Google's link-spam policy. The aim is not to collect as many links as possible but to make content worth referencing.

For a translation business, practical SEO begins with accurate service pages and helpful explanations. A page about quality translation services, for example, should answer a client's real questions rather than repeat the same phrase for a search engine.