Worst SEO Mistakes - Aggressive Search Engine Optimization Firms

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Aggressive may mean effective. All effective SEO firms buy links, meaning that most good SEOs are official black hats. Are you okay with the risks? Many effective firms actively use spam and other black hat methods to promote their clients. Greedy ones get burned. Those who are smart watch carefully and know when to pull back -- because there is no safety net.

You should know if your SEO firm does black hat up front. Rewards are great, but so are the risks.

Automated Content Generation

Automated content generation involves a bot scraping the net, mixing articles and producing low value pages camouflaged as a web site. It's often part of the link farm an AdSense site.

Duplicate content detection has improved to the point that search engines will know in no time if you're spamming.

Frames

This is not spam, but a bad mistake, like building a Flash-based web site. Frames are hard to crawl for spiders; they have no unique URLs to link to and are horrible from a usability perspective. Sites that use frames lose on all fronts.

Cloaking

Cloaking still works if done correctly. Some good SEOs still use cloaking, but if you're new, stay away from it. Cloaking presents a normal page to visitors but a super-optimized page to search engine spiders.

Hidden Text

Hidden text involves stuffing keywords onto a page and making keywords the same color as the background. This is an absolutely pointless technique since search engines discount pages if they see keyword stuffing.

If you put legitimate text or an optimized article on your site as hidden text, just to make page look shorter, it still doesn't make sense. There are CSS "hide/show" tricks that can conceal text while being search engine friendly.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing involves putting a bunch of keywords on a page simply to get higher rankings. It's pointless. Search engines can tell when you're using too many keywords for natural content, and your visitors will find keyword-stuffed content to be difficult to read.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are one-page websites optimized for a specific keyword and made with one purpose - to rank in the search results. All links on the "doorway" page lead to the real website, essentially acting as an entrance, hence the name "doorway page." Search engine do not like doorway pages, but they still work.

Next: Alt Tag Stuffing >>
 

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Comments On: Worst SEO Mistakes

· I thought the article was knowledgeable but it wasn't thorough or complete. For...    · Quite good article! Thanx to Ivan ! Хорошо...    · Thanks for the info about not spamming the alt tags. I have been doing that and...    · I am in the midst of building a pretty good size link farm and my contributing URL's...    · Hi! thanks for the article. It was informative and good to read even though it was...    · Want a free tip? If you're launching a BRAND NEW website, there is NO easier way to...    · Tanks for that piece of wisdom, it's worth a try    · All of those are good points, but I feel are often incomplete. Sitemaps... you fail...    · 1. Just don't be spammy. 2. Sure put in some misspells. 3. Google can crawl it...    · can you tell me how to stay in place?    · In the article the term 'pagerank' was used, it should actually be 'Page rank', it...   >>> Post your comment now!