Top 5 SEO Mistakes

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Here is a list of the top 5 mistakes people make when doing SEO. Don't do this or else you will pay for it when you lose all of your rankings.

1. Never ever do black hat SEO. Black hat SEO involves blasting your site to thousands of directories, blogs, forums, ect... This is a sure way of losing your rankings.

Note: Your rank may actually boost for a little while but once Google and other search engines pick up on your tricks, you will lose your rankings altogether.

2. Don't just pay anyone to do your SEO work. Most SEO companies have bad reputations and may use black hat methods to try and rank you highly. Do a lot of research if you plan on hiring a 3rd party company. A lot of people lost their rankings when they hired 3rd party companies. Be careful.

3. Want to buy 10,000 visitors for $10? Don't! That kind of garbage traffic doesn't convert anyway. In fact, this will harm your rankings. Why? Google will see that most people who end up on your site don't stay longer for a few seconds. 99.9% of garbage traffic is just that. The traffic is usually a bot that goes to your site, stays on for a few seconds, and leaves. This harms your site and makes search engines think your site is worthless since nobody stays longer than a few seconds and nobody browses other pages on your site.

4. Do not use link farms. Link farms are one of the worst things you can do to your site. Some companies will offer you easy ways to get back links if you put their code somewhere on your site. What this does is show Google that you are promoting thousands of outbound links that are promoting back to you. Its unnatural and does not work. Google considers this spam and devalues your site real quick.

5. Having broken pages, broken images, and broken links on your site will hurt it. If you don't upkeep your site, Google will notice and devalue it real quick. Google has not patience for webmasters that keep half working sites while the other half is broken. Always check around and make sure that your site is in good working order. If 95% - 99% of the site works well, you will be ok, but anything less than 95% will harm your site.
#search engine optimization #mistakes #seo #top
  • This might go better in the seo forum. Just sayin :-)
  • In any case good info to be sure
  • Best way to avoid a tragedy is to remember the points. Lots of things happen when people try to cheat.
    • [1] reply
    • Point #3 is completely, 100% wrong.

      While I agree that the traffic is worthless, search engines have no way of knowing anything about your traffic other than visitors that come from their search engine. Even then, they have no way of knowing how long any visitor spends on your site.
      • [1] reply
  • Of course. I've been doing this for 10 years and can tell you for 100% certainty that Google knows your visitor data.
    • [1] reply
    • Yes, if you use Analytics, Google has access to that data, but only a small percentage of websites use Google Analytics, so it would seem unlikely that even the ones who do are having that data factored into their rankings.

      Same goes for Chrome.

      And I can tell you with 100% certainty that you are completely wrong. If your website is not hosted on a Google property and you are not using AdSense or Google Analytics on your site, they do not have access to any data about your website visitors.

      Some people think that Google IS the internet.
  • Banned
    I think you guys are talking about two different traffic scenarios. I have no doubts Google can track just about anything traffic does from things like this:
    • Logged into a Google account.
    • Chrome browser (probably even Incognito).
    • Adsense on the page traffic lands on.
    • Analytics on the page traffic lands on.
    • A page that traffic lands on that includes an embedded Youtube video.
    • G+ button on web page that traffic lands on.
    • Any other embedded Google code/product.

    If traffic isn't logged into any Google product & the page traffic lands on has no Google code (ex: Adsense, Analytics, G+ button, Youtube video, etc...), then I don't see how it would be possible to track traffic.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Nobody knows anything for certain but with the money, manpower, and sophistication of Google, anything is possible.
    • [1] reply

    • So in other words, you are just making stuff up.
      • [ 2 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
    If you think about those G+ buttons, it's the ultimate scheme to let Google track web page activity for pages where the webmaster is paranoid of things like Analytics.
    • [1] reply
  • Mike, for sites that do have Google Analytics, you would agree that Google does use the on-site data to adjust the rankings for those sites?
    • [1] reply
    • It is really impossible to tell. In order to even test that you would have to use a SERP where you have basically all 10 of the first page listings with 10 different sites that you own so that you can see the data.

      On top of that, it's pretty much impossible still to keep everything in enough of a bubble to really test it.

      My opinion though, is no, they don't use the data. Probably less than 5% of the webpages out there have Google Analytics on them. It's just not a significant percentage to factor in any of the data.

      For example... let's say none of the sites except the site ranking #3 for some search term is running GA and it has a really low time on site metric. People spend less than 30 seconds on the site. Ok. So now what? How does that time on site compare to #4 or #5? It might seem low, but it might actually be better than either of those. So how can Google incorporate that data in a meaningful way?
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  • yes you are right I've heard lot of things about this thing and i am myself lil bit confused. but i think it's better that you keep on focusing the things that are already working well in seo.
    If you want to try out the other strategies, there is always a risk involved, and it may cost you loosing all your reputation.
  • Some third party SEO firms are professional, just my opinion.
  • Black hat is definitely a horrible strategy in the long term.
  • Nothing really new but something useful really. I've thanked you
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  • Especially 3 is really important. So many people are using those techniques to improve traffic... But don't expects sales or refs from BOTS!
  • Great Tips !! 2nd and third one happens with many firms.
  • When I started working online, this was my first mistake. At the end, my site got de-indexed.
    • [1] reply
    • and a couple of replies later...

      And there you have it folks, "expert" WarriorForum SEO advice in all it's glory!
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Have to agree with it all, great post. 1 + 3 are mistakes I've made along with some others. Submission to thousands of search engines/directories at the click of a button can actually have a negative affect on your sites ranking, and cheap untargeted traffic is a complete waste of time.
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    Top 5 SEO Mistakes

    Here is a list of the top 5 mistakes people make when doing SEO. Don't do this or else you will pay for it when you lose all of your rankings. 1. Never ever do black hat SEO. Black hat SEO involves blasting your site to thousands of directories, blogs, forums, ect... This is a sure way of losing your rankings.