Posted by Darrell Long on September 19th, 2007 — Posted in Bad SEO Practices
There is a great article over at guerillainternetmarketing.com entitled “What happened to ethics? SEOs that hide their methods and mislead clients”. I thought the insight into how many SEOs, consultants, and agencies are conducting their services and misleading to the clients they acquire to be dead on. The article goes into detail on a couple of the ways clients can be deceived as well as not having the clients best interest at heart.
My only comments to the article would that with many firms, more so with larger firms they tends to be have a “cookie cutter strategy” which is used for each and every client versus evaluating what the client really needs and developing a strategy which will work. I call this method the “herding of the sheep”. We all know that no two clients have the same goals so why would you use the same strategy for both? It’s just a really bad disservice to the client and in the end gives the rest of us a bad rap.
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Posted by Darrell Long on September 14th, 2007 — Posted in Bad SEO Practices
Search engine technologies are amongst the fastest evolving arenas on the Internet. Unfortunately, many webmasters are not keeping pace with this explosive medium. Outdated techniques are still being used with the best of intentions, and unfortunately often produce the worst of results. Webmasters must retool thinking and core SEO competencies to keep pace with the times.
The olden golden days of the Internet are over. The shortcuts we all used to take in order to get artificial SEO results are now not only frowned upon, but considered to be highly unethical. Negative impacts from outdated and improper SEO practices can result in dramatically lowered organic rankings to even being dropped from the search engines entirely.
A practice area around SEO is emerging and many webmasters should consider consulting with a colleague engaged in this specialty, rather than attempting to become the master of all.
Search engine ranking algorithms contain some 200 variables and over 5% of those algorithms change on a weekly basis. How much extra time do you have Mr. Webmaster?
Check out our top ten worst search engine optimization techniques. Find out if you are a blessing or a curse to your websites SEO viability and organic rankings:
TOP TEN OUTDATED SEO PRACTICES
Bad Practice One - Keyword Stuffing – defined as stuffing an extreme amount of the same keyword throughout the web page. This would include putting the same keywords in your keyword Meta tag over and over again, using the same keyword within the content so much it loses all since of credibility and seems to be redundant.
Bad Practice Two - Cloaking - A technique in which the content presented to the search engine spiders is different from that presented to the users’ browser. Cloaking is often used as a spam technique, to try to trick the search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking. This could ultimately be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine result pages (SERPS). For this, the search engines have deemed cloaking to be a deceptive technique and have ruled it a violation of their guidelines.
Bad Practice Three - Elongated URL’s – The length of a URL is a factor when determining your placement organically. Using URL’s which pass too many variables or extremely long can have a negative impact. In some cases, can prevent the search engine spiders from effectively crawling the particular page. Be sure to keep the URL’s short and to the point, but more importantly using the primary key phrase for the page within the URL. As a rule of thumb, you should be able to identify the main point of any web page just by viewing the URL for the page.
Bad Practice Four - Aggressive Link Building - Building high quality and relevant links is a very great way of increasing the amount of exposure your website receives. It’s when you are building link for the sole purpose of achieving higher organic rankings is where you will find yourself in trouble. The search engines don’t want you building links for the sole purpose of rankings. You want to build links in a naturally occurring fashion. For example, if your website has been active for 2 years and has a total of 50 inbound links, then the next month you’re up to 4,000, something’s wrong. The engines are going to pick up on this and you can be looking at a potential ban from the engines.
Bad Practice Five - Improper Re-directs – Redirecting one page to another can be a process which can have negative effects on your organic rankings. This can be prevented by ensuring the proper re-directs are in place. There are many redirects which can be used, however the only search engine friendly re-direct is a 301 re-direct. A 301 re-direct is a permanent re-direct from one page to the other, so this tells the search engines to re-assign the traction acquired for the old page to the new page. Any other form of re-direct will result in no transfer in weight and could actually cause duplicate content issues to appear.
Bad Practice Six - Page Title Abuse – The title of a web page plays a major role in determining how the page is going to be placed organically. Stay away from creating page titles which are extremely long or the same throughout the website. The page title should typically consist of 5 – 7 words with the primary key phrase for the page present and preferably towards the beginning of the page title. Stay away from starting your page titles off with your company name as the space can be more productively used to showcase the theme of the page. If you wish to have your company name within the page title, place it at the end of the title. The reason for this is the search engines read page titles in a linear fashion, so the most important part of the page title is at the beginning.
Bad Practice Seven - Frame Sets – Using frames to display multiple web pages within one on browser window can cause serious issues with having each of the web pages crawled by the search engines. In many cases the crawlers will only index one of the pages, leaving other out of the index. This would mean that the content which is housed within the other web pages will not be seen by the search engines.
Bad Practice Eight - Code Bloat – Lets start by defining what code bloat actually is. It’s the amount of code it takes to build a web page. Now there are a couple reasons why this plays an important role in the organic success of your web page. There are over 200 known factors to determine where a web page gets placed organically; one of those factors is what’s known as the “Code to Content Ratio”.
This would mean the search engines look at how much code it takes to build the page versus how much content resides on the page. The less amount of code you have the better. One way to reduce the amount of code would be to look at places where you can reference code from external files such as Java script or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
Bad Practice Nine - Hindering Navigation – The navigation of your website plays a tremendous role in the success of your website for your organic search efforts. It is crucial that the search engines be able to understand and find all the pages of your website. Technologies such as Java script and Flash can hinder the search engine spiders from effectively finding the pages throughout your website.
Bad Practice Ten – Hidden Text– Content on a web page is one of the most crucial factors when it comes to having that particular page being found for the key phrases you wish. One outdated and unethical technique is to develop content for the sole purpose of manipulating organic search listings which was hidden to the visitor but seen by the search engines. Most of the time this was achieved by ensuring the content was the same color as the background of the page, or by allowing the font size to be so small you visitor was unable to see it.
The most dangerous course of action you can take would be to properly implement the wrong strategy. Be sure to fully understand how your website is being built to ensure it doesn’t have a negative impact on your organic rankings.
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