4 Misused SEO Techiques and How You Can Combat Them

It sucks when you try really hard to improve search engine rankings and your hard work actually lowers them.  Unfourtunely there is a vast quantity of wrong information out there, and sometimes you will be misinformed.

Make sure that you correct yourself if you use any of these common, yet bad techniques.  

Nofollow

Nofollow started out as a great idea, a basic html attribute that tells search engines not to follow the link.  Google said to use it to prevent link spam (commonly found in comments), link to a website that has questionable content (if the website is illegal or something similar), and when selling paid links.  

However, webmasters soon started abusing the system.  They thought that they could slap a Nofollow attribute on all links and prevent any link juice loss.  This seemed like a reasonable idea at the time, so many webmasters followed it.  

This does not work at all because you still lose link juice, and you mess up the entire linking system.  Read my blog post Everyone Needs to Switch to Dofollow for more information.

Directories

Directories started out as a easy way to build links: everyone loved them.  Now that search engines cracked down on directories, there aren’t many worthwhile directories to submit to.  Submitting your website to hundreds of directories will get you nowhere with search engines, and you might even get penalized (I can’t conform that though).

The two most worthwhile directories are Yahoo and DMOZ.  There are some other good ones out there, but most directories are pointless to submit to.

Link Building

Links building is a great way to enhance search engine position, but many people do it wrong.  You should be shooting for natural, high quality links, but many people get spammy, low quality, unrelated to website topic links.  

Using article marketing just to build links, using forums just to build links, commenting just to build links, submitting your site to way too many directories, and building links much to fast are just some ways to abuse link building.  When you do this, you are only hurting your website.  A good post to read to learn more is Link Building is Like Acne.

Anchor Text

Anchor text — if you don’t know — is the text that displays the link.  For example the link "Link Building is Like Acne" above would be the anchor text for that link.

A story that comes to mind when thinking of anchor text is the Google bomb Bush story.  Apparently the Bush administration’s website was linked to so much with anchor text along the lines of "miserable failure" that it came up first for that term in Google even though the words weren’t found on the website.

Yes, anchor text is powerful, but don’t misuse it.  Google wants links to look natural, and you want people to click on links.  When you use the text that best fits the situation you are using the link, people will click through more, you will have varied anchor text (so you won’t get penalized by search engines), and you won’t sound awkward.

I recommend that you stay away from creating artificial anchor text (linking to a link using your targeted keyword over and over) as many people do, but I do recommend that you are aware of it.  For instance, don’t use the anchor text "here", when you can rephrase the sentence to include better anchor text.

 photo credit: Daniel Suarez™

Tagged as: search engine optimization, SEO