How to Kill an SEO Campaign
Posted By Melanie Prough on April 5, 2009
Just like many others, I belong to a few webmaster forums. I make a habit of answering questions I know the answer to, and learning from others even more often than that. So today we will have a little backwards fun and go over the most common ways to most effectively KILL your SEO endeavors that I have actually been logging for a month. Not very scientific here, just some fun and maybe some eye opening for newer webmasters just beginning to experiment with their SEO.
- Not using, stuffing, or failure to optimize the title tag. This is the most common thing I have seen in all the sites I have looked at, hands down. All the SEO in the world is not much help if you stuff your pages and incur a spam penalty.
- Duplication in many forms seems to be rampant as well. Failure to setup proper canonical url structure, cookie cutter sites with no discernible content, duplicated titles and meta, sites containing reprinted material exclusively, and my favorite all the real content hidden away from the engines in Flash or Java script so the pages are left duplicate. SEO, in about much more that where to put your menus, and how to get traffic.
- Java and Flash menus with no sitemap, nor spider palatable links added to the pages. I have gotten to the point that I don’t even check the backlinks first anymore, this is usually the issue. Google menu generator, and you will see why.
- Really lousy anchor text to their own inner pages…Clicks like 1, 2, 3. This page view is generally preceded by a question regarding why that inner page is not ranking well with Google after they have completed the SEO. C’mon, at least vote well for your own pages.
- Abuse, misuse, no use, or neglect of heretical structure of heading tags. Heading tags that are paragraphs, stuffed, empty, missing, 6 H1′s, or misordered. Folks, these will help you rank if you use them properly.
- Sites with 90% reciprocal or forum sig backlinks. In most cases this speaks directly to the quality of their content. You NEED organic links…Enough said.
- Hidden text, the majority of the cases have been accidental with the CSS set to not display. Hidden none the less. There have only been a few problems possibly related, but worth a mention. In most cases, they turned out to be caused by inexperience with an editor, or template driven. This tool can be helpful in checking for some parameters commonly seen spam related in your pages, follow the directions.
Clearly there are other problems, but in the last month in my travels these are the most popular by a landslide. I just thought this might be an interesting post to do. I live and I learn every day. Nothing makes me happier, than that 5 page thread where it has taken 15 webmasters 6 days to troubleshoot the problem with a particular site. This is the real value of community SEO forums and boards. At the end of the day, if you have learned nothing………Start over you did it wrong.
Melanie Prough
Link to this Post
Comments