SEO – Bad practices
I’m splitting this up into 2 areas:
Problems with your practices, and problems with design
Problems with your practices
Doorway pages and sites
These are now viewed as blatant SPAM, which will get you banned pronto
Keywords
Keywords are good, but there importance diminished in about 2003, when the SEO companies abused them so much the search engines demoted their input in the search. Nowadays search engines take into account the text “AS SEEN BY THE END USER” to establish rankings. As I mentioned before – the title tag is very important, as end users see this, as is the description tag
Duplicating your content
Duplication is now frowned upon by search engines – so unless you have a valid business reason for doing it don’t. An acceptable reason would be a high contrast version for visually impaired customers for example
Invisible text crammed with keywords
There are 2 variants of this – text that is the same or a close colour to the background colour, or text that is not on the visible page (say 8 pages down from a load of line breaks) for example. If you do either you will get yourself banned. Google has thousands of people in Asia that actually spend all day looking at stuff like this. If you get banned you are stuffed for ages
Miss-understanding page rank and linking
In the old days – it mattered who linked to you, nowadays it matters more who you link to. If you link to other relevant content, your page will be ranked higher
Link exchange
Link exchanges might have worked once, but now are a waste of time if exchanged without relevance – again 5 years ago it worked, now it doesn’t
Buying links
Now Google sell their own links and positioning to you, they will penalise you if you are paying for it. They look for words like sponsors or advertisers associated with the link or unrelated links (to each other) or links unrelated to the search page. Your competitors can report you for doing to this, and if they review your sire you can kiss your ranking goodbye
Cloaking
Cloaking is where your site has different for search engines, compared to what is actually on the site visible to the end browser – this is a good way of getting black listed
Problems with your design
Flash
Flash hides all text in a movie, so from a search engines point of view there isnt a site to rank, as it sees no visible text… If you insist on flash, write a HTML version of the same content too. Photographer’s sites are top heavy on the flash content
Session ID’s
If your site uses Session IDs you could be in trouble, as now the major search engines seem to be basing ranking on its view of your site over a long time frame. This is partially why a ranking takes so long to achieve. Basically a static page is good; a dynamic page is less good. The problem with session ID’s is they dynamically change the actual URL (the page name is in flux), so when the search engine comes back to look for www.sillysite.co.uk/page1.php?hl=en&q=23848489302, it will not be there. Instead use cookies to store the session state. What the search engine then sees are 2 differing pages, and neither gets ranked
Framesets
Framesets cause 2 problems, search engines cant follow them, and then when they do the browser comes in on the left margin, not the whole site
Scripting languages
Using too much scripting language: can confuse some search engines to the point of not being able to find your content on a page. If you use a scripting language – pop it in an include file
Pictures, no text
The photographer fave… no text just pictures… nothing for the search engine to see = no ranking. Search engines like 250-500 words minimum on a page
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