SEO Techniques to Avoid

Useless Link Exchanges

Once upon a time, you could scout out other websites that were related to yours and swap links to help boost your link popularity. The more the better. These days the search engines are frowning on certain link exchange strategies.

The best kind of link exchange is one that offers a contextual link to both parties. So instead of creating a "page-o-links" that no one will even read, offer your potential link partner a contextual link in an article that is related to their site. Ask your partner to do the same for you. The search engines will see this link as a much better quality link than a link from a page chuck-full of other sites.

Let's say you have a website on dieting. Instead of creating a "list-o-links" page titled "Other Diet Resources" where you list 300 different partner links, write some diet-related articles and recommend a few of your link partner's sites within the context of the article.

Don't go hogwild with link exchanges. They are not nearly as valuable as they once were so I wouldn't spend too much time seeking out a bunch. If you can get a few, relevant quality exchanges that's fine

Nowadays, the real value comes in the one-way exchanges where someone links to your site and you do not have to link back. The best way to earn those is to create a site full of value.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are small, keyword focused pages that mainly serve the purpose of getting the visitor to your affiliated web site. They usually offer no value to the website as a whole, and often times they are cluttered with several different affiliate links.

Google is smart and can scope those kinds of pages out. You may be penalized if it finds these on your site.

Hidden or Tiny Text

This is an OLD tactic and it amazes me people still use this.

Using white text on a white background or making your text so small it is hardly visible to the human eye is one of the oldest search engine tricks in the book.

Many people would use this technique to hide tons of keyword phrases they wanted to rank high for by hiding the text at the very bottom or top of the page and make it match the background color so they are invisible. Others would use a tiny font to add these keywords in various places all over the site. The human eye may have a difficult time finding them but the search engine spiders would.

So as you can see, the above info is not shocking by any stretch of the imagination. Those are all very bad optimization practices and will never work for the long run. You may get lucky here and there but the engines will eventually find you and penalize you for it.

Too Much Duplicate Content

It's OK to use some of the article directories (ArticleCity.com or EzineArticles.com) and reprint some of their content. That's what they're there for and they are useful if you want to add information on a topic you may not be well versed in.

However, if 90% of your site is from these sites or if you are illegally using copyrighted material without a webmaster's permission then you deserve any penalty that Google gives you.

Google loves unique content. After all, it's what drives their success. They don't want the same articles showing up in the results so they pay close attention to duplicates.

If you don't like to write, try hiring a copyrighter to do the writing for you. Trust me, it will be worth it in the long run.

Oversubmitting to Directories

Submitting to a few relevant, high-quality directories is fine. Spending hours per day seeking out high PageRank directories is not. It's a waste of time.

In the video below, Matt Cutts (Google's lead engineer) tells you what Google thinks of most directories and which ones they value.