Summary: Most Deadly SEO Sins
There is a great article on Site-Reference.com about the “Most Deadly SEO Sins”. It pretty much covers the basics, especially if you’re just getting started or if you’ve only had your website for a short amount of time.
Here are the top “SEO Sins” (no particular order):
- Optimizing for the wrong keywords
- Spamming
- Hidden text
- Doorway pages
- Doorway domains / multiple domains
- Duplicate content
- Cloaking
- Keyword spam
- Excessive HTML markup
- Creating search engine roadblocks
- Having Flash-based sites
- Having text in images
- Having free content behind login
- Poor site inter-linking
- Deep directory structure
- Having less content / Non-original content
- Using session ID’s
- No efforts to get incoming links
- Relying on one-time SEO
- Showing impatience
Wow… that’s a lot of Sin.
I don’t disagree with any of the points made here, but it’s important to know that many of them still work today and that many (MANY) companies are still using them on their websites and getting good search engine rankings.
One of the Sins pointed out always makes me laugh becauses it’s humorous…. everyone always says “cloaking” is bad for SEO, but then at the same time they’ll say that “IP delivery” is ok. Last I checked, they’re basically the exact same thing – Google accepts IP delivery from major companies through Akamai page feeds (custom content, etc.), but good ‘ol Joe Schmoe trying to do the same thing cheaper gets tagged for cloaking.
You’d be surprised how many potential clients out there still ask us to employ some of these SEO tactics because they think that it works. We spend hours talking them out of it and they’re better off in the end.
MorePro has good SEO practices and doesn’t employ any of the tactics/sins listed above. That’s not to say we haven’t used some of these SEO tactics in the past, but we’re definitely in the white/gray hat area as far as search engine optimization goes.
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