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6 SEO and 6 Linking Mistakes You Should Avoid

The following post is guest authored by Pushkar, who owns nBridges Media and manages SEO campaigns for various health, finance, law, ecommerce and product based websites. Feel free to contact him for any such inquiries.

First of all thanks to Jim Karter for providing me the opportunity to make this post. I was thinking of asking him but his instant message made the things a lot simpler.

So after some serious thinking, I have decided to write 2 short posts on SEO and linking Mistakes which most of the people commit (mostly new comers). Please do note this is in no way any kind of exhaustive list or complete list. In the future, I may write a better version of it on this blog. So here we go.

6 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

1. DO NOT change the title of pages which are already doing well in SERPs. I had done this mistake in the past and suffered heavily. The moment you change the title, your page will surely go down in SERPs and will may or may not come again (in few weeks time) depending the extent of change you have done to it.

2. Meta Tags spamming. Don’t waste time in meta keyword stuffing. Its useless. Just keep very few keyword in it, if you want to.

3. Have same title and description for all the pages. Title is probably “the” most important element of your page. Sometimes, by mistakes (from newbies), either the title of all the pages becomes same or the description becomes similar. I have seen this a lot, in forums specially. So you better fix it.

4. Too many links on a page, and worst, too many useless links on a page. Make sure you nofollow your registration pages, login pages as well as footer and other useless links to avoid PR leak. Also try to avoid those site-wide menu links which don’t add much value in terms of usability.

5. No proper formatting of content. Try to use all H2, H3 and strong tags to make the content look better, not only to the user but to the search engine bots as well. Tell the bot, what the page is about.

6. Excessive use of ajax, javascript and flash. Avoid using them too much, at-least not on content rich pages. Its alright to use them but make sure, they don’t “get” your important content.

6 Linking Mistakes You Should Avoid

seo-linking-mistakes.png1. Avoid unnatural links. I remember, in 2006, people were fine with any kind of links as Google didn’t used to give very high weight age to neighborhood and was only concerned about PR but in 2008, things are a lot different. Now a bad neighborhood can seriously damage your search engine rankings so be careful to what you are linking and from where your links are coming from.

2. Automated link exchange programs are dead. DigitalPoint coop and LinkVault (I am not even sure they are running now) are dead and as Link Metro and similar sites. I haven’t checked them since months and now no one talks about them. So you too better don’t talk about them.

3. Reciprocals don’t work anymore. In most cases, blatant reciprocal from links.php pages or running linkman and similar reciprocal scripts wont work, so don’t waste your time on them. You may get link partners (mostly pharma links) but you will be better of without them.

4. Never spam, as it doesn’t work. In the wonder years of 2005 (and before) people used to spam guestbooks heavily and it also used to work. But now, its sure shot method of getting kicked out from Google index.

5. Don’t use blackhat techniques unless you know what you are doing. (Jim Karter: Dont’ use them even if you know. ) There are people who make tons of money by spamming and doing black hat, but they know what they are doing and are pro players. You being a rookie, can do serious harm to your good sites. Saying that, there is nothing wrong in testing the grey area of search engine rankings, just make sure you don’t do this on your good sites.

6. Be careful in buying posts and links. Are you even getting what you are paying for? Do not blindly buy any link seeing its PR. Ask yourself, is the cost of that link justifiable? Also, do not buy 1 month or 2 month links but if you really want to buy links, look for at-least 6 months to 1 year links. Do make sure that you only get link from related website and sites which can also give you some traffic. Avoid getting site-wide and footer links, but look for natural links.

You may like to check my SEO Tips section to know more about link and traffic building SEO Tips.

For the time being, this is all.

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Welcome back!

You should follow me on twitter here.

Jim Karter on July 17th 2008 in Blogging, Link Building

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40 Responses to “6 SEO and 6 Linking Mistakes You Should Avoid”

  1. Pushkar responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 4:25 am #

    Thanks jim karter :)

    @to others - Feel free to express your views here, I will be more than happy to talk about them

  2. harshads responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 5:36 am #

    Hey Pushkar nice post.
    Btw,
    I wanna talk to you on SEO so can you give me your YIM id?

    Thanks.

  3. Redbullish responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 7:42 am #

    I agree with everything, I personally do not buy link over six months. You can pay for a year or perm link and it could devalue in a years time. So sticking with 6 six links seem to be the method.

  4. medical videos responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 9:02 am #

    thank you for these tips i suffered alot when i changed the titles of one of my sites
    so i agree with you in this point

  5. Raoraj responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 9:08 am #

    Thanks Pusker for such a great post on SEO.

  6. Pushkar responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 9:32 am #

    Thanks for the comments guys, to be very honest, I just wrote this in a hurry and its not a great list. Nonetheless, if you people are finding it useful than its solving its purpose I guess.

    Cheers

  7. Zak Show responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 10:15 am #

    Nice post Pushkar, I agree with you in the majority of the ideas explained below, but I have a different idea in 2 points:

    1/ The page title: I used to have a travel site that I managed for about 5 months, I had many links and done some directory submissions and I got a very few number of visits per month from SE, not more than 10! But when I edited the title, it jumped to about 30 from the first week and it was 200 visits from SE for the next month after the edition.

    2/ Too many links in a page: If they are no-follow, there is no problem, it’s used only for traffic and does not harm SERPs

    What do you think?

  8. Leveraging internet marketing responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 10:18 am #

    Harshad nice post with pertinent points.
    Though I have a query. How do you calculate the price of a link for a particular time frame?

  9. San Nayak responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 10:31 am #

    I will update with 2 things here.

    - On last Pubcon conference Google guys confirmed that they don’t see meta keyword tag anymore, if you are opting to get traffic from google then you can stop filling keywords in metatag. Don’t know about other search engines but i guess they might have stopped or will stop very soon.

    - Don’t buy any temporary links, Every incoming link gives you some credit and every incoming link you loose takes some credit back symbolising as spam. Once someone gives your site some credit has very low chances that he/she will remove the link if that comes naturally so try looking for only permanent links coming from deep content.

    Good Luck Guys….

  10. kent responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 11:57 am #

    “Also try to avoid those site-wide menu links which don’t add much value in terms of usability.”

    do you mean navigation? how is this possible to avoid?

  11. jawaan responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 8:30 pm #

    some of my incoming links from wrong site which is i dont want them but i cannot remove them either because its been done by somebody else. how can i avoid that.

  12. Carol responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 9:15 pm #

    I also have bad experience changing my page title. Btw, you are admirable making a good post in hurry.

  13. Link Building Bible responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 10:01 pm #

    @ ZakShow….

    He was saying don’t change the title for the ones doing well in the SERPs… if your page is sucking, then yah, make a better title….and you’ll see similar results as yours… but if it’s doing good for a keyword driving you traffic…. then do not change it.

  14. Make Money Online with Harry responded on 17 Jul 2008 at 11:09 pm #

    Most of us are following the laws set by Google and forget other search engines. I am making money with traffic from Yahoo & MSN. I still use the DP co-op on my sites which gives me high rankings on Yahoo & MSN so I dont care about Google anyways.

  15. pankaj responded on 18 Jul 2008 at 12:31 am #

    i just don’t agree here:

    3. Have same title and description for all the pages. Title is probably “the” most important element of your page. Sometimes, by mistakes (from newbies), either the title of all the pages becomes same or the description becomes similar. I have seen this a lot, in forums specially. So you better fix it.

  16. Shooting games responded on 18 Jul 2008 at 3:02 am #

    Changing page title can be done, if you are just rearranging words, but not adding new one. This technique is good when are in top 3 spots on Google, and you experiment a little to see if you can increase your CTR.

    Cheers

  17. Make Money Online with Harry responded on 18 Jul 2008 at 6:28 am #

    Pankaj: I guess what he means by that is
    Mistake: Have same title and description for all the pages.
    So he means that you should NOT have same title and description. :)

  18. Free Link Exchange responded on 18 Jul 2008 at 1:26 pm #

    Thanks for nice update Jim, I wil take care of this

  19. San Nayak responded on 20 Jul 2008 at 6:24 am #

    @Pankaj

    He is trying to say try to have all your pages the unique content by having unique title, meta description and on page content. This helps in page ranking so avoid any content that is shared among your pages.

  20. Roofrack responded on 20 Jul 2008 at 7:40 pm #

    Well thought out titles for posts on blogs are very important. Don’t write something thats just funny make sure its on topic.

  21. Ryan @ Smarter Wealth responded on 21 Jul 2008 at 1:55 am #

    Cool post,
    I tend not to use any black hat techniques. As you said I am a rookie and I don’t want to damage my chances of having a good page rank. I would prefer to do it the right way. I believe that if you do it the right way then good things will come back to you.
    Good tips…but a question. How do you alter the description of your page if you run a blog?

  22. Pushkar responded on 21 Jul 2008 at 3:26 am #

    Not sure what caused the confusion here ??? I was obviously saying that Don’t Keep same Meta Description for all the pages (mostly do it by mistake without realizing it) :)

    Specially on ecommerce sites where the owner kind of fails to see this.

  23. Pushkar responded on 21 Jul 2008 at 3:29 am #

    “but a question. How do you alter the description of your page if you run a blog?”

    @Ryan - Most of blogs uses wordpress and though it hass been some time since I have worked on it, you can check allinone seo wordpress plugin for it. WP has tons of meta tags plugins(one too many IMO).

    Please check the respective site/forums for the blogging platform which you are using to get better answer, but in most cases, it is easily done.

  24. Jim Karter responded on 21 Jul 2008 at 4:37 am #

    “All in One SEO” plugin is the answer.

  25. Play online games responded on 22 Jul 2008 at 8:54 am #

    Thanks for the article there. I was wondering as to how do follow backlinks compare to one way links ?.

  26. massage lover responded on 27 Jul 2008 at 6:10 pm #

    Reciprocal link doesn’t work?
    It isn’t true … work but only from related sites.
    And no more than 10-20 reciprocal link from a site

  27. Improve Rankings - Newlife responded on 02 Aug 2008 at 10:16 pm #

    Talking about SEO and linking Mistakes, a few years back I decided that my website needed a face-lift. Now I do not know if this is coincidence but after changing nothing but the structure and graphics on my website, I mysteriously disappeared from the search engines.

    Therefore, this could possibly be another thing to be weary about attempting. As any drastic changes to your website might also affect your standings in the search engines.

    Great article by the way!

  28. EarnMoneyOnline Blog responded on 10 Aug 2008 at 1:55 am #

    Highly informative SEO post. I will keep this in mind when I create my post!

  29. massage lover responded on 10 Aug 2008 at 5:24 am #

    I am using Seo Title Tag … so i can have custom title to every post category as well as page og my site.
    Only problem with that is cause it make coding mistakes with some characters such as apostrophe …. for example in word jim’s :)

  30. EL Locco responded on 17 Aug 2008 at 8:13 am #

    Great tips for me, Thanks Jim

  31. Pushkar responded on 17 Aug 2008 at 9:53 am #

    “Great tips for me, Thanks Jim”

    Helllooo….

  32. Forex Robot Reviews responded on 17 Aug 2008 at 2:12 pm #

    This is a good post, most of it I already knew, but it has reminded me to go and do some things I have been meaning to do for a while.

    Thanks

    Jim

  33. condo responded on 19 Aug 2008 at 8:13 pm #

    very good article, it’s very helpful to do SEO in my website

  34. SEO Tricks responded on 29 Aug 2008 at 4:46 am #

    Few things are new for me here.. I will keep them in mind… Thanks Pushkar

  35. Pushkar responded on 29 Aug 2008 at 7:42 am #

    Thanks Rishabh, I have updated the list of SEO Mistakes on my blog - so u can check it at http://nbridges.com/blog/

    Regards

  36. SEO Tricks responded on 17 Sep 2008 at 6:24 am #

    Thanks for those lovely tips.. Love it

  37. Aditya responded on 18 Sep 2008 at 10:02 am #

    Goood stuff. helpful

    i am doin abt all these mistakes

  38. smasra.com responded on 04 Oct 2008 at 3:20 pm #

    really thanks jim for allow Pushkar to post this i hope i used this tips in my new blog

  39. Fantastic Sarch responded on 14 Oct 2008 at 6:19 am #

    nice post.

  40. Mr. Ex Back responded on 06 Dec 2008 at 12:21 pm #

    These are some very good tips

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