SEO Insanity? What are the top mistakes people new to SEO keep doing?

Newbies often get link building completely wrong. They're building social bookmarks, social signals and all sort of pointless crap. The mechanism behind a good link is not that hard to understand, but it's not self-evident either. It find it frustrating to see a lot of people involved in busywork and feel-good exercises, and call their hobby of manual nofollow link-spamming "SEO".

Fiverr is a cancer. Nuff said.

There's also a very weird notion of "uniqueness" that many newbies believe in. They write or commission low-grade content that's technically "original" in the sense that the same words haven't occurred in that particular order. This, of course, is a completely pointless exercise, because Google's algorithms compare the topics and themes across articles. There's very little new in the world, and often there's strong niche sites competing for practically the same piece. It's as if these people believe that Google's algorithm is like a 4-yo kid who doesn't really know how to read yet, but copies letter by letter from an example text.

E-commerce sites fairly often use vendor-provided texts or practically no text at all, so it should be obvious why the product pages don't rank. If WF SEO is any indicator it's not obvious, however.