I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a few of the worst offenders:
- Repetitive Keyword Targeting
If you're targeting a specific keyword term or phrase, it's not necessary, and often ill-advised, to place that keyword in the title tag, H1 and body text of every page on your site. It's certainly OK to use the term/phrase in passing and when relevant, but remember that pages target rankings, not sites - a good rule is to target one specific keyword term/phrase per page, sometimes more, but only in rare circumstances (like when you're trying to get a secondary, indented listing) do you actually want to target the same term on multiple pages. - Splitting Efforts Across Many Domains
If you've found 10 reliable sources to get links, don't fall into the trap of thinking you can register 500 domains, get them all links from your 10 sources, then link from those sites back to your main domain and suddenly appear to have a diverse domain backlink profile. Splitting up your efforts on multiple domains is, in my opinion, rarely advisable (see this post for more) and can seriously detract from your goal of gaining rankings on a single site. The days of link farms and link islands are long gone - with link acquisition, quality is slowly but surely getting the upper hand on quantity, so use strategies that will get you the right links, not just any link. - Reciprocal Linking
I'm not sure what happened, but reciprocal linking seems to be making a comeback (and both Google & Yahoo! have been doling out some penalties recently for sites engaging in it). It's not that reciprocal linking is inherently bad - if I link to Aaron's SEOBook (a great site, BTW), and he links to me (which he sometimes does), that's not what I'd call "reciprocal linking." I'm referring to the practice of creating link list pages on websites and then trading with other link list pages on other sites - the "you link to me and I'll link to you" phenomenon. These aren't hard to algorithmically spot and we see penalty after penalty (or at least, devaluation) hitting sites that leverage this tactic. - Keyword Stuffing
If you're not ranking for a given keyword, placing a few dozen more instances of it on your page is very rarely the answer. Folks have been asking about modified versions of their keywords, whether they need to add more related text content, whether they need to use it more times per sentence or per paragraph and my answer is always the same. Once you've got your keyword in your content a few times, in your H1, title and URL, and maybe in the alt tag of an image, you're 80-90% of the way there with on-page optimization. The content needs to be valuable to a human (so you can earn links and interest and return visits and sharing), not more "optimized" for search engines with repetitions of your keyword. - Blocking Bots Access to Duplicate Content
I think fear plays a major part in this one. People read that duplicate content causes a penalty, so they block bots from accessing duplicate versions of their content. The problem is that you lose the link juice those pages may accumulate and potentially restrict access to pages that would let the engines better crawl and index your site. If you want to fight duplicate content, try either 301 re-directing the duplicate version back to the original or employing the new canonical URL tag (if & when appropriate). Don't just go blocking bots from pages unless you're sure you know what you're doing. - Avoiding XML Sitemaps
Maybe it's my fault for previously recommending that webmasters don't submit Sitemaps. Let me just go on record again as saying that I have come 180 degrees on this and now completely endorse sitemaps for nearly every kind of site. In every instance we've seen them used properly, they've added significant boosts in search traffic over a very short period. If you want an easy win, and haven't yet invested in the sitemaps XML protocol, go do it. - Blocking Bots Rather than Using Nofollow
I think there's been some confusion about how PageRank sculpting works. You should NOT block bots access to pages you don't want to send link juice to - in fact, this doesn't even accomplish that goal. If a link points to a page, even if that page is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots noindex, it still accrues link value metrics. The only way to stop a link from passing juice is to use a nofollow (or to make it via an external Javascript redirect or embed in a non-HTML-parseable object). Please be careful about what you noindex or block to bots and why - you don't just hurt that page, you can hurt downstream areas of your site by walling off navigation paths too (and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out). - Paranoia About Registering with Google Webmaster Tools
Unless you truly are nefarious and have designs around link manipulation and scheming, there's really nothing to fear by registering your site with Google's Webmaster Tools. The value of having their metrics on hand and knowing what they report (especially with non-accessible pages) almost always outweighs the tinfoil hat theories. - Ignoring Non-Google Search Engines
Why limit yourself to Google!? Just because they're the market leader doesn't mean that another 15-20% of search traffic from Yahoo!, MSN & Ask isn't worthwhile. Most people salivate at boosting SEO 15-20% but continue to ignore the other engines. As a first step, at least register with Live Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer and send them your sitemap. Beyond that, Ben's research next week will go into a bit more about the ranking algorithm differences between these three engines. - Using Google's Link Command
The Google link: command presents a (very) small sample of the links Google knows about, and while, for comparison purposes, it does appear to have some degree of accuracy, the actual links reported by it are in no way particularly significant. Just because a link does or does not show via this command doesn't make it better/worse/more interesting than any other link you have (or should try to acquire). - Submitting Articles for Links
I'm not always against the practice of submitting articles or content to other sites (heck, YOUmoz is one of the best links an SEO can get, IMO), but beware of submitting tons of the same article over and over to sites in the hope of getting more links. The value passed is not high (at least, from 99% of these sites) and you do lose the value of having great content on your own site (and earning the search traffic and links that might have flowed to it naturally). Just be smart about why you're pursuing this strategy and mindful of the benefits and drawbacks. - Chasing DoFollow Blogs
When did dofollow blogs become the link acquisition practice du jour? Honestly, I have yet to see competitive rankings earned from a dofollow blog link strategy, and the focus on it to the exclusion of other, more valuable and scalable linking tactics is a cause for concern. When you're starting a link building campaign, remember the immortal words "nothing worth having comes easy."
Please feel free to contribute your own frequently-seen misconceptions or mistakes made by new SEOs. And for those reading this who are new - don't feel bad at all! I can't enumerate the number of pitfalls I suffered in my first few years tackling organic search. From 2002-2004, I was as green as they come, and it really took a half dozen campaigns and lots of help from the good people in the SEO industry to pull me out.
Re: point 5. Assuming here that you're talking about blocking all access via robots.txt, not restricting indexing with meta noindex. I've seen circumstances where people don't want to redirect the duplicated content, e.g. when the content is branded differently for different parts of the site. Say you have a section for blue widgets and a section for red widgets, and an article about blue and red widgets. You may want human visitors within the site to to able to access both, so you can't redirect the blue widgets-branded version of the article to the red branded article. You're also getting push back on using rel=canonical because the site owners still don't trust that it will work, which is fair enough: all we really have thus far is search engines' words.
However, the site owners are prepared to forfeit search traffic to one of the pages to avoid duplicate content and to ensure the high rankings of the important page. If you throw a noindex, follow tag on the less-important page, all the links on that page will still be crawled and it'll pass PageRank. Granted, it'll accumulate PageRank that is "wasted" from the perspective of ever being able to rank, but surely noindex, follow is worth considering.
I personally think the canonical URL tag is going to see a lot of support from the engines, especially if you're a relatively trusted domain and are using it properly. The alternative, of course, is to do the 301s or use the hash # on your URLs, both of which are also good.
Noindex, follow for pages you want crawled and link followed but content not parsed/appearing is definitely still a good idea for those specialized scenarios - thanks Jane :-)
Although this certainly wouldn't be for beginners, I'd really love to see a solid, experimental comparison of (1) robots.txt, (2) no-follow, (3) META no-index, (4) 301 redirection, and (5) rel="canonical". If anyone has the resources to launch that kind of study, I'd love to help.
13. Ignoring the need for original content
This is one that I think new seo's and non-seo website owners make often. I find that if you do not include keyword focused content into your strategy, then you are ignoring a big piece of the seo pie.
Great post Rand! I am guilty of a few of these in my short time as an SEO, but thanks to posts like this one, and other resources on moz I am quickly kicking all of my bad habits! ( In SEO that is )
Speaking of moz resources...I was reviewing Danny's Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO ( A must read ) and I stumbled across the
Google Search Engine Ranking Factors ( an even bigger must read )
These are two great resources that have literally changed the way I go about SEO. If any other newcomers reading this post haven't checked these out stop reading RIGHT NOW and check them out. They will make you a better SEO in minutes!!!
We started dedicating ourselves to A+ content about a year ago. We figured the best way to do that was to get the top experts in our niche blogging for us. The best way to do that was to start a radio station and interview the top experts, transcribe the show and create a widget which directs people to the transcript page and launches the radio player.
You can see and example of how it works here. https://tinyurl.com/an8vks . We actually started a company called vertio.net (vertical radio) to white label for others so they could drive A+ 'text' and 'audio' content as well. Where the Google algorithm is going, it wants the top experts in the world on page 1.
1. Google webmaster tools are great. We use joomla, so we just bought a plug in that pulls an xml Sitemap. I troll it for weird stuff, make sure it's valid, then submit. We had about 4k new pages indexed in a week or so. Sweet! And I check the tools every few weeks to see what wackiness is happening. Has helped me ferret out types of URLs web dev needs to 404.
2. Question Re: links pages.
We do have links pages, but they are actual handy sites that might be helpful to users around certain topic areas, that are relevant to the content on our site. Every once in awhile, like 5% or less of the time, we do the old, "if you link to me, I'll link to you" thing. Can you talk about what critical mass is necessary for linking like this to cause a penalty?
Hi ErinTM. I'm often responding to Not Found pages in Google Webmaster Tools as well. More often than not, it's an opportunity for a 301, not a 404. This might not be the case for you, as of course, in many cases it really is a 404 (page no longer exists), but if those missing pages have links coming into them, and you can 301 redirect those pages to a new (or very similar) version of that page, then that's some valuable recoverd link juice that will feed your whole site.
I hear you. Haven't been able to make that case yet to my director. I'll keep working at it! In most cases these are URLs that are created by the cms, so only a spider would get there, not a person.
Great post.
...but beware of submitting tons of the same article over and over to sites in the hope of getting more links. The value passed is not high (at least, from 99% of these sites) and you do lose the value of having great content on your own site (and earning the search traffic and links that might have flowed to it naturally).
I would say that 75% of the links I am building are embedded in relevant content, written by myself (sometimes outsourced). The idea behind that is that - eventually - a newly-created page that contains our content and a couple of links will gain PR, and it will be far more valuable than a floating keyword on a homepage with no relevant content.
As a rule, we do not send out duplicate content. Not smart! Every article we send out is different, to avoid dup content issues down the road.
This is a great reference - I'm going to print it too.
As far as reciprocal linking - what about a "resources" page with outbound links that are nofollowed? If you're not in the habit of reciprocal linking, and do it only in a "make-or-break" situation, a page with a few nofollowed reciprocal links seems ok to me.
Totally agree in regard to the webmaster tools - this resource is a great way of knowing how the search engines in general are indexing your website but more importantly if they are having and problems accessing the content and if your server is serving the pages etc correctly.
A big thing i think new SEO's do is think that Google and the other engines are against them when really it's not true. The search engines just want rid of all the junk out there to serve up better results for the public so they can sell their advertising speace for more.
I believe you should work with the search engines and not see them as the enemy.
I love Google WebMaster tools. They are an easy and invaluable way to keep track of how your site is doing. If you're doing a site redesign they especially come in handy for 404s.
Rand, awesome post. I completely agree and I am guilty of #9. I don't know why we are sometimes so dependent of google. Especially when there are some many areas of business that are still garnering most of their searches on other search engines. Not to mention the power of some of the directories.
Oh goodie! I'd love to find out how to get something to rank well on Live intentionally! I've had it happen by accident, but have a hard time duplicating it :)
I'd add "Not targeting web referral traffic." I.e. not giving enough attention to relevant sites and forums (that might be nofollowed) but deliver the type of customer that best fits a given site, directly.
I could shoe horn this into SEO by saying that those sites often run their own website search or can ofter a different point of entry in the rankings, but really it's just a good practice to develop a diversified referrer profile. Plus, if you're creating content that people want to look at and allow in the conversation, that's probably a good sign that you can promote it to a wider audience.
What would be even more interesting than this list would be the top mistakes a newbie makes with PPC!
I bet that list would be just a TAD longer ;)
Hey, Rand. Thanks to signing up with Webmaster Tools, I discovered why I'm still not being listed in search since 12/30/08: web crawl errors.
I think Google loves to find these: by adjusting the titles for a bunch of my products on my website to make them more SEO, Google awarded me 88 web crawl errors. (I wonder if I broke a record doing this.)
Spamming social media is most common mistake all the newcomers make.
As always - a great post, basic but then sometimes people tend to go on a overdrive and overlook the basics.
I am sure that all these activities are not going to come to grinding halt after people read this post. But the intelligent lot of new comers will sure draw some valuable inferences.
The one area where people (new comers especially) also falter is that they write website content for search engines. Senseless repetition of keyword(s) and a complete disregards for semantics.
I am in no way, shape nor form an "SEO Expert" but I have noticed one thing with n00bs to starting up websites for profit (friends and family).
They get all excited when I tell them the basic tenets of SEO and then after a month or two they totally give up writing new content and working on the site.
Most n00bs don't realize that good rankings take time, unless you get really lucky.
I too was guilty of this as I am an "instant gratification" type of guy, so had I been working on the site, building links and writing good content when it was in it's infancy stages (and not ranking for anything much), I might have had a huge site today.
Another mistake that I made was the "Amazon.com Syndrome". I built the site from the ass-end forward and really didn't think about the future and where I wanted it to go. There is a really good reason for this and I don't want to get into it, but just the same.
Rankings aren't everything though - hail the power of social media!
I just started work on my own blog (bit of slack time, kinda, I used to sleep then, but I digress ..) and managed overnight to increase my visits from c.300/day to c.900/day. That's small fry admittedly but I doubt very much that alot of that was due to established SERPs position / PR, mostly just due to writing content and submitting it to relevant places = instant gratification (seriously I've not experienced people blogging about my posts in other languages before as commercial stuff I do is all locally focussed).
This has boosted my ad revenue about 200 fold, I'm on about $2 per mo. now. Eventually I'm hoping to use it to the effect of increasing my [perceived] authority for clients.
Great post, indeed, as everyone has said.
Must admit to being guilty of #3, but that's mainly for non-English language sites that have very few other options ...
Also, I have a question about #1 - I learned (from an SEO I respect) that for small sites that are new to SEO, or just plain new sites, it makes sense to optimize a "site-wide" keyword for all pages of the site, in order to give it a jump start for that major keyword.
Do I have to re-think that strategy?
I would really appreciate if someone could answer this.
I'm relatively new to SEO myself... thanks for outlining some of the common mistakes. There are a good few there that I wasn't completely aware of.
What made you make the 180 degree turn on sitemaps? I've heard good arguments on both sides.
it is also interesting to me
Good post Rand, it is always worth re-covering the basics. I agree, there does seem to be a recurrence of a lot of the old tactics, perhaps because there are so many new SEO's around now and so much of the free "information" online is quite dated?
Regardless, another good post.
Cheers,
Andrew
The point about sitemaps is very helpful - I'll make that todays task.
Thanks for the useful post.
Jamey aka WongaWoman
Wonga.com
Wow! Only 12. Thanks for the tips and the encouraging words at the end of your post.
I would also add some of my own experience:
#13 too much concerning on PageRank and Alexa Rank rather than Visitor and Traffic.
#14 Agreed to thrillophilia : Spamming Social Media I've seen people add me in some social media just for promoting their spam blog without any social interaction.
#15 Quick money mindset. many people (friend) I met think that they could get quick instant money from internet.
to me whether doing Online or Offline business it's all almost the same. Need hard work, Goal, plan and strategy.
But to me "quick" money through internet marketing means "quicker" compare to offline business model.
#16 No Need Investment : this is why they always try to look for something free. Free Domain, Free Hosting, Free (Crap) eBook.
Thank you Rand for correcting your recommendation regarding the sitemap. It shows greatness that you have the curage to admin that you haven't been right on that subject. I will include now more sitemaps for my projects.
great article rand
good stuff, Rand.
I've found that a common mistake by newcomers is adding your site to every directory that they can find. I'm not saying all directories are bad, in fact many are very valuable, but it should be understood that they should be a low percentage of your overall links and a majority of them have very little if any value.
The better strategy is to build your links around great content, which has been advised in this post. This will lead to more relevant and valuable links, versus wasting countless days, weeks or even months collecting links that have little value.
That's really useful to share with clients, Rand. For me, there are two main challenges when dealing with most clients:
a) Convincing them there are no "quick wins" e.g. stuffing the hell out of footer links.
b) Convincing them to invest in good quality content that is beneficial to the user and which sits within a logical hierarchy.
See you on the panel next week!
Great refresher Rand.
It's all about proper fundementals.
You you mentioned in you post:
"Please be careful about what you noindex or block to bots and why - you don't just hurt that page, you can hurt downstream areas of your site by walling off navigation paths too (and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out)."
Since when can a noindex hurt a page by walling off navigation paths too and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out?
Noindex cannot stop link juice that flows in from flowing out. That can only happen with a nofollow.
I felt it was necessary to mention here, as that statement is incorrect and misleading.
Keeping quality content at the heart of your blog will cut the time it takes you to build up your loyal following.
You'll stand out to and find that your network grows just through providing quality and sincerity.
Yeah, there still seems to be quite a few sites with token content on which just seems to be there to try to fill space and fish for links.
The best thing about quality content (or remarkable content) is that people will want to link to it naturally. Among them will be popular bloggers. It's links like that
that get you noticed by Google.
What a great breakdown of don'ts! I am printing this list out and keeping it by my computer for future references. About reciprocals, if you have a links page with thousands of entries, should you remove it from your site? We have an older domain that has had a link page such as this for years. This site is coming up in rankings but always gets knocked down when we hit page three of Google. Will removing this page help or hurt us?
Thanks, Rand - great post!
I've seen your videos and your post that typically give a word of caution when using the "NOFOLLOW" rule, and I see your point (and it makes sense) when it comes to internal pages.
But isn't there a very useful play on the NOFOLLOW when you have pages or posts in a blog (when you don't have it globally set) that point to external sites?
If Google PR is very simply put, votes in minus votes out, or link juice in minus the juice your giving,why would we link out at all, and NOFOLLOW every external link?
I'm not sure what the correct answer is...
Thanks!
Rand, a very nice list of newbie issues that I am sure is a good comparative point even for accomplished SEO's. I think a breakdown of Google, Yahoo! and MSN SEO tactics would be very helpful to see since I think most people are unaware of how these three can help in traffic and positioning for different terms or content.
When is Ben's review coming out? I don't think I've seen it as of yet...
Rand at point 7 you said:
The only way to stop a link from passing juice is to use a nofollow (or to make it via an external Javascript redirect or embed in a non-HTML-parseable object).
And what if the link redirects (with a 301) through a page that is forbidden by robots.txt?
This was dually beneficial for me. First, I felt like I knew at least 10 out of 12 so maybe I'm finally learning something. :) Second, there were a few that were new to me. We're definitely overlooking Y! and MSN... time to invest some SEO into the other 2 engines. :)
Thanks Randy i was in serach of this kind of article.The article was very informative But what do you think about Web Analytics?
13. Thinking Rand's Name Is "Randy"
Just teasing - this seems to happen a lot on SEOmoz.
I was wondering though on reciprocal linking, if another site has my site listed in their 'industry links' page will that potentially hurt my PR? I don't have them listed on my site nor do I have an 'industry links' page where I'm linking to them, so it's just one way. But if the SE can tell the difference between that kind of link versus the seobook/seomoz kind of linking, I just want to be sure I don't get penalized by having my link in someone else's industry links page. thanks!
I have seen Repetitive Keywordin a well known website, it ranks for a very competitive and profitable keywords. It is hard to say what extent will be enough and somebody has to take the risk.
This article is a good introduction to SEO for novice users. It addresses the key points for reciprocal link building, keyword distribution and preparing a website ready for Google search engines. 'Blocking bots access to duplicate content' - this is a good point to make. Losing 'link juice' as it were, is extremely important. If you do not make your website accessible to other search engines, then your content will be pointless and will not be optimisied correctly.
Rand,
I'm a newbie to the SEO party.
I have to admit that I have committed some of the sins that you mention.
Since I am new, I'm trying to figure out whom to believe because there are so many 'experts' spouting conflicting informatiom.
Do you have any hard data that I could look at that supports your post?
Please don't take this comment personally.
You seem like a sharp guy.
Regards,
Joe
I think it's easy when you're starting out to pick up on SEO tips and run with them thinking you're doing the right thing. Some of these might help a small business achieve modest goals, it's only when the objectives become more ambitious that you realise the limitations of some SEO strategies or tactics.
Thanks for this. I'll print it out and keep it handy. Some good points.
Talk about perfect timing for this post. While lots I already knew there were a few that I didn't.
Yesterday I booked my very first client. SEOmoz is going to be such a valuable tool.
Great article, that point on not using keywords throughout an entire site is a good one... It took me a while to really get into my head that Google ranks web pages not web sites in the first instance.
But a rising tide floats all boats ...
Great post. Helpful lists for those starting out.
These really are 12 Golden Rules to start off on the right foot for any SEO.
Of particular note, I'm very guilty of #9 all the time and you bring up a valid point; who wouldn't want 15-20% increase in SEO.
Also, your duplicate content point is very valid. There's a definite understanding that a penalty is on the way if you're found with duplicate content and that it can take time to rectify that penalty. I know in our experiences with white-label partners we employ noindex, nofollow except for a handful of pages unique to the partner. So far so good.
Great post and definitely raised some interesting points for me.
Again the big two area that interested me were your comments on reciprocal linking and XML sitemaps. I'm relatively new to the world of SEO and when i initially trained by someone with a vast amount of SEO experience their stance was
1) Reciprocal linking is good as long as you keep it mainly restricted to between companies in the same field as you (so for a real estate site get links from other real estate sites) and don't get involved in three way linking.
2) Sitemaps were something you did once at the beginning of the SEO process and then pretty much only revisited if you had major site changes.
Was the advise given to me outdated? Or have there been shifts in the industry in the last 12 months that have prompted you to make these suggestions?
With reciprocal links that function in that classical, "my links page points to your homepage and your links page points to mine" scenario, I think even relevant reciprocal linking is a relatively low value activity. I'm not saying it won't help, just that other paths to link acquisition will provide more value, particularly in the long run.
Sitemaps - see my comment below. For some reason, they seem to always provide some traffic boosts, even when things look perfectly optimized/indexed.
Excellent post Rand.
Regarding point 3. Reciprocal Linking - where do you stand with using a strategy like the "3 way linking strategy" for local business?
Let's say your client has 100 clients with websites...you go and call each of his clients and ask for a link to your site...you may supply the HTML for the anchor etc...you might get it or you might get a straight URL link back. You now go and reciprocate by giving 100 clients a link...however, your links to them come from your blog which is set up on another server.
Is it worth all the trouble of using this method or do you get good enough link juice swapping links on each others website?
Kel - any link method that's designed to artificially inflate link popularity is going to attract the attention of a bunch of very smart PHD engineers from Google, working out ways to discount their value. While it may be worthwhile in the short run, we've certainly seen plenty of cases where 3-way or 4-way or more reciprocal strategies eventually stopped providing link value. Google (and the other engines) simply don't like to be manipulated and will fight back.
Hi Rand - Point taken....I haven't done any 3 way linking....guilty of thinking out loud about it...but no action.
Still on the reciprocal linking though....where you talk about combinies in the same type of business giving each other links and not being penalised for it.....how vertical can you go.
I.E. if you were a Financial Planner (not that you'd want to be one at present) and you delt with a real estate firm (investment options for clients) and you shared a reciprocal link with them...
I've re-read the post again....printed and laminated.
Hey Rand,
Thanks for your insights they're really useful - reading this blog is something I have to do every day now... I always learn something new or find something to think about :)
Thanks Rand. I really needed to take a look and read this one. I think I am missing something.
Good breakdown of the basic tenent. Though I have just advised a client to build links with companies and partners within their industry - especially those they have existing relationships with. They want a Partners page to offer links back - should I recommend they offer these in a different way? From my thinking it should be a good way of building relevant, contextual links...but should I be aware of how we feature these on site?
That was my question too.
After going through that same thought process myself, I think that google intends it that way. If you look at the original purpose behind using one-way links as a "popularity factor" to gauge the usefullness of a page, it kind of makes sense.
Generally sites that would link to eachother as part of a "partner agreement" are not really a "user" endorsement, and therefore do not constitute a 'vote of usefullness'.
I think Google pretty much categorizes it's playing field into 2 categories, websites, and users. This sounds extremely basic and almost stupidly-simple, but in an 'Us vs. Them' mentality it makes sense for a ranking structure.
I really hate making this as a suggestion, but it really is a can of worms Google and the alike have opened up since they appear to devalue reciprocal linking. But the strategy I have is to make the links on the Partner page "nofollow" or block the entire partner link page from bots in robots.txt or "nofollow, noindex". This way when someone reciprocates a link it actually looks like you have a one-way link from the other site in the search engines view. You should also request that the reciprocal link is a in-content link from another page with little to no outgoing links. Lastly, if the webmaster from the other page is SEO savvy then they may be well aware of your tricks and your client run the potential of losing a reciprocal link and integrity. However, many industries are unaware of the "nofollow" attribute and will never know or ever care.
Eh....kind of a bad way to do business.
I wouldn't really operate that way, even if I could get away with it.
Your making the mistake of thinking that your "partners" are idiots.
Don't you think people looking for good links will check for nofollow? The only reciprocal links you'll get will be from low value sites, lots of these would probably hurt IMO.
Having said that I would agree with a partner to swap nofollow links, it's not all about SEO, you want customers too!
Weirdly enough, there's a big difference between a "partners" page and a reciprocal links page. Check out something like this Microsoft Partners page - very unlikely Google would penalize those sites from linking back to Microsoft from their partner pages or Microsoft for linking to them. But compare that to this page (which actually isn't nearly as bad or off-topic as many I've seen) and that style, which I suspect doesn't carry nearly the same quality/value long term from an SEO link perspective.
Thanks Rand.
So what's the best method for small business sites to acquire incoming links if these sort of links pages aren't that effective?
Create content that's so cool or useful that other sites link to it so that they can be cool or useful by showing it to their readers. The kind of stuff that you link to for the benefit of your readers.
But assuming that's not always possible (e.g. a small brochure site with no regularly updated news), are there any other methods?
Find blogs that accept guest bloggers. Write high quality, informative, unique articles, and submit those with a bio section that links to your site.
Nice recap Rand, speaking of keyword stuffing do you think that your 90% of the ranking equation post is still actual today?
Yeah - I still generally agree with that. As we do more research about ranking factors and more statistical analysis with our models from Linkscape, I think we'll get a lot more rigorous (from a math/science perspective) about this. Hope to have some solid research on that front very soon.
On 4 - keyword stuffing - writing a post recently on CSS image replacement techniques I came across the problem that all the techniques are called "Jones image replacement" (or whatever). This means I've 22 instances of "image replacement", often in headings, which is pretty high and looks like stuffing to me - despite avoiding it wherever possible.
It's a long post so I think the density is fine, but I wonder where the penalties come in. Notice that SEOMoz.org has only 7 instances of "search engine" on it's front page.
Thanks for that post. I've seen a lot of this kind of "optimization" through the last years.
Could you tell uns more about your XML-Sitemaps experiences? I almost only use them with relaunches or poorly crawlable sites.
what about having good unique quality affiliate website for each area of your product, if you have a business where you provide multiple services or same services on multiple location (across world), will you consider to design a website for each area or you try to focus on main website only....bare in mind that there are company which only provide those services only on one location and they are very strong in SE rnaking already
Thanx for a very good post! I'm at the stage where you say you where 2002-2004.
One of the things I didnt know was that it was enough with the keyword at 3-4 places. Thank you for that! (And other news to me)
best regards!
Joakim ErikssonPhotographer and Designer, SEO wanna-be :-)
These are some really helpful and detailed tips, especially for conducting an audit on a young program. I also appreciate your use of some technical language. I sometimes know that things work a certain way, but not the how or why. Tips, detail and language like this help direct my team and shape our programs.
Interesting comment on #6 - XML Sitemaps. With a well-structured site that is already indexed properly, would you argue that adding an xml sitemap will help improve rankings? Please elaborate...
Tyson - even though I don't have a good explanation for why, yes I would argue that. I've just seen too many cases now where sitemaps helped improve traffic, even when indexing looked solid. Maybe there's an additional trust signal there? Or it helps pages on the "verge" of being supplemental?
Do you have some real numbers / examples for that?
I couldn't see any improvements with sitemaps, the only thing is an increased crawl frequency, but no increase in visits.
I can't really share our clients data, but needless to say - nearly every client has benefitted (the small, the mid-size and of course, the very large).
I recently took added an XML sitemap to a web site and within days saw the pagerank go from a five to a six. It was challenging to say whether there was a direct correlation or not since we were doing other SEO enhancements as well, such as a link building campaign. It made me curious, so I tried it with another well structured site and the same thing happened. Seems that XML sitemaps provide a definite boost!
(Edited a silly spelling mistake).
On #7 you say "Please be careful about what you noindex or block to bots and why - you don't just hurt that page, you can hurt downstream areas of your site by walling off navigation paths too (and even stop link juice that flows in from flowing out)."
I thought that if I did a meta noindex,follow on a page and did not exclude it in robots.txt, that the link juice would still flow in and flow out of the page as normal, just that the particular page would not be indexed (i.e. it would not hurt downstream areas of the site). Did I misunderstand this?
Big ups to sitemaps, why wait to get noticed. Using sitemaps with live, ask, google and yahoo got my mothers site to front pages for a couple tattoo related search terms in just over three weeks. SEOmoz crew helped too with the awesome tools section! Thanks!
I just started my sight yesterday...in infancy stages, but my first blog is called Grassroots and Tattoos
www.stlsearchmarketing.com
Good Luck with your moms site!!
Thanks for good post as always....
I would like to know that what happen when we have targeted a keyword for home page of the website and it starts ranking in google serp. then we created a inner page specific to that keyword and start optimization.
What will be the results google give both results or the new page will not come in ranking????
Thanks in advance!!!
"Chasing DoFollow Blogs ... I have yet to see competitive rankings earned from a dofollow blog link strategy"
Do you think this differs depending on the keyword? If I was pursuing car insurance, p0rn or any of the other idiotic keywords left on my blog, then I'd agree. But if you're after ranking for fairly niche keywords, then a dose of dofollow comment links from relevant pages are better than nothing, surely. Well, they're probably obviously better than nothing! But probably worth the effort of pursuing, no?
Robots.txt can be crucial. Subscribe and read Incredibill blog every change you got. Just know what it really stands for.
https://incredibill.blogspot.com/ ? He's a funny guy! Interesting post about javascript being crawled though.
don't forget "reading blogs as law and doing what they say without knowing what "it" does."
I think blogs are an excellent resource (depending on the resource of course). There is no way to find out what "it" does without trying it!
Thanks for these tips, have to say I've been guilty of a few
If Rand was'nt such a genius and good business leader, i would question some things here.... but i must say before i got. the pro membership advice i got was pretty much common sense. asking how to promote my music blog, i got the standard response "monthly features," "lists" and "flyers" nothing that made a lightbulb go off and nothing i didnt already read ad nauseum. either way that was just one person.
Another thing that newcomers want is to optimize all the keywords for the main page of a site. Sometimes, clients ask for situations like this too or, at least, imagine that SEO services are just this.
"haev"?
Sorry, couldn't help it, this is for the spelling and grammar nazis. Other than that, I agree with what's in place here.
Sincerely,
"Have"
p.s. I'm always this much of a jerk. :)
I found a typo: "saying that I haev come 180 degrees."
Yes Yes Yes, please keep teaching this philosophy. That way, I can build links and use farms and outrank all of you!
I always wondered why I have such an easy time dominating every niche I enter.
Now I know, these drones are following your advice Rand!
THanks man, keep this stuff going. In fact, let's all Stumble and Digg this post too.
AL
thank Rand!