Costly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - Wastes of Time and Money
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Okay, if you don’t do your own SEO, I sincerely hope you know better than to hire the SEO company that just sent you an e-mail out of the blue saying that they can drastically improve your position in the SERPs. That is spam. No, you can’t buy hundreds or thousands of good links for $50; no, you can’t believe them when they say they can quickly get you a top position in the SERPs for whatever keywords you want.
Make no mistake; good backlinks are worth their weight in gold. But the good ones take real time and effort to generate. The ones that you’ll be getting for your $50 or $100 will be unrelated to your content, and therefore not counted as particularly valuable by the search engines. Besides, if your site suddenly gets tons of backlinks, that’s going to look very suspicious to the search engines, and could result in a penalty.
Likewise, submitting your URL to search engines is a waste of time. They’ll come and index it soon enough; sooner than you might think, in fact, if you get some good links from other sites for the spiders to follow. That’s assuming you’ve set up your site so that they can crawl it (more on that in a bit).
Naturally, if you shouldn’t waste time submitting your URL to the search engines, you also shouldn’t waste money on having someone else submit your web site to the search engines. Don’t do this even if they say that they’ll submit it to thousands of search engines and directories. That strategy might have worked five or more years ago, but it certainly doesn’t work today. The problem is, most of the directories you’re likely to get your site submitted to this way are link farms, and those do get penalized by Google. The only directories which I have consistently heard might still be worth submitting to are DMOZ and Yahoo’s directory.
What about getting a link to your site from Wikipedia? The vast majority of articles in that volunteer-edited online encyclopedia do link to relevant web sites. However, Wikipedia uses rel=”nofollow” on those links, which means that they don’t get crawled by the search engines. On the other hand, those who read the article might choose to click on one of the reference links to find out more information, and a rel=”nofollow” certainly doesn’t prevent that. Just remember that if your link isn’t truly relevant, it can be removed by one of Wikipedia’s editors.
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